Christianity changes the face of the truth debate when the Apostle John writes “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, was with God, and the Word was God…The Word has become flesh and we have seen His glory.”  What is John saying?  Mainly, that the absolute truth, the Word (logos), has become a person.  Absolute truth is no longer and abstraction (set of rules) but a person.  We believe in a personal absolute.  And here’s what you’re made for; here’s your design:  you are made to behold His glory, to love Him, to know Him, to enjoy Him.  What difference does this make?  If absolute truth is a principle it’s dehumanizing but if it’s a person it’s liberating.  Going back to the love analogy above, we said that if you love, you must surrender your independence.  But 2 people must do it together.  If both adjust, sacrifice, and surrender, it’s heaven, but if only one person does it, it’s hell.  If it’s only 1 way, then it is dehumanizing.  If relationship with God is only one way, then it too is the same.  If God is throwing down abstractions saying you must do this, you must not do this, you must surrender yourself, adjust yourself, and sacrifice yourself, then that is a hellish one-way relationship.  But that does not describe Christianity’s God.  Our God says God, the absolute truth, became a person and went to the cross.  On that cross, Jesus said I’ll lose my independence for you, I’ll surrender for you, I’ll adjust for you, I’ll be exploited for you, I’ll give up my freedom for you (Phil. 2.1-11).  The ultimate free Being was bound and nailed so that you could know that you can trust Him.  This is liberation.  The one-way relationship is slavery but the personal relationship lives the life I should have lived and saves me by sheer grace. 

Rethinking Freedom.  Consider two paradoxical statements made by Paul:  “Though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them (I Cor. 9.19); You were called to freedom, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another (Gal. 5.13).  Now, we might think these statements nonsense b/c we think freedom means no constraint, doing what I want at all times, etc.  But Paul says that is too simplistic.  For instance, let’s suppose that you are training for a race.  In order to do that, you must restrict yourself from doing everything you want to do in order to do the main thing you need to do.  So, you will have to give up certain foods, say no to certain activities, wake up earlier, and get off the couch more often. You must place restrictions on one part of your freedom so you can enjoy a deeper, richer freedom.  Similarly, a fish on the grass is not free; his power and life is only present in the restrictive habitat of water.  Thus, freedom is the presence of right restrictions.  Freedom is the fulfillment of design.  What is our design?  What are we made for?

Love as the Ultimate Example.  We know the power of this if we simply think about love.  The freedom to feel love does not come unless you restrict your individual freedom.  In order to experience the freedom love offers, you must be willing to submit yourself to the truth.  You probably know that I will argue that in the same way, you must submit to the truth of God.  Maybe this thought frightens you more as you think of a time when you submitted to a person, when you gave up your freedom, and got burned.  Now, you think, ‘I’m afraid of being exposed, duped, and dehumanized again—that’s the very reason I’m afraid to give myself to the truth of God.’  Next week, I will deal with this objection and how it relates to Jesus.

 1.  Without Truth, We Lose All Right to Moral Outrage.  Whatever the issue, whether you accept the Christian view or not, your personal worldview will always and necessarily impose absolutes not only on you but others, based on what you believe is right or wrong. Said differently, if we want to create our own “personal truth,” then to be consistent we must relinquish completely the right to ever be upset about the views that others hold, especially views with which we disagree. As Tim Keller says, “Aren’t there any people in the world who are doing things you believe are wrong that they should stop doing no matter what they believe inside about right and wrong? Then you do believe that there is some kind of moral obligation that people should abide by and which stands in judgment over their internal choices and convictions.”  Maybe it’s the way someone raises their kids, another person’s competitive spirit, the spending habits of a family member, the decorating prowess of a neighbor, or maybe it’s slavery and genocide in Africa or sexual abuse against children.  All require absolute truth. 

 2.  Without Truth, Everyday Life Makes no Sense.  John Piper shows us how true this principle must be.  Jesus teaches that truth is precious.  All of us agree with this when we are being lied about.  The most relativistic professor in the university, who scoffs at the concept of truth in the classroom, will be indignant if his electricity bill is false to his disadvantage.  He will call the utility company and complain that there is some mistake.  He will not think it funny if the voice on the other end says, ‘It’s a mistake in your view, but not in our view.’  Think of all the times you need to have THE truth, not just a version of it.  Is this water drinkable or isn’t it?  Are you a friend or a spy?  Will you keep your marriage vows to love and cherish me, or are you only interested in money and sex?  Do we have enough fuel on this airplane to reach our destination or should we turn back?  Will this surgery correct my problem or worsen it?  Did the desperate 911 caller say 11th Avenue or 11th Street?  G.K. Chesterton’s comments:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason…The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn… The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder.  But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether…We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

 3.  Without Truth, We are Blind.  C. S. Lewis:  “You cannot go on explaining away forever, or you will find that you have explained away your own explanation.  You cannot go on seeing through things forever.  The whole point of seeing through something is to see something else through it.  For example, it’s good that you can see through a window but that’s only b/c the garden behind is opaque.  But if you could see through everything, if everything was transparent, a wholly transparent world would be an invisible world.  And to see through everything would be the same as not to see.” In other words, if you say all truth claims are power plays, so is that (a truth claim), so I don’t have to listen to you.  Or if you say with Freud that all claims about God and religion are really just projected guilt and insecurity, well so is that (a statement about God and religion).  So I don’t have to listen to you; you’ve explained away your explanation.  If the evolutionary biologists tell you that everything you believe about God, morality, and truth is really just hard-wired brain chemistry there to allow you to pass along your genetic code, well everything their mind tells them is the same, even about evolutionary biology.  To see through everything is not to see.  To claim that nobody can make truth claims is itself a truth claim that puts you on top so you can go around and dismiss or disprove everyone else. 

4. Without Truth, We are Slaves.  Everyone makes truth claims; therefore it’s not making the claim itself that leads to oppression; it’s what’s in the claim.  When 5 girls were killed senselessly in an Amish school a few years ago, the Amish community responded with compassion and forgiveness toward the killer and his family.  We know that the Amish are fundamentalists, who are always accused of oppressive use of the truth, but truth claims don’t lead to oppression in this instance.  Why?  Because it depends on what the fundamental is!  The fundamental is a man dying on a cross for His enemies and spends His last breath blessing and forgiving those who hated Him.  So, it depends on what’s IN the truth claim.  This is why Jesus can say in John 8 that the truth will set you free.

Next week, we’ll look at the nature of freedom as it relates to truth.

[1]  Largely developed from work done by Dr. Tim Keller and Rev. Scott Sauls, Redeemer Presbyterian Church

On that basis, let’s look briefly at Jesus’ record for violence, oppression, and persecution.  First, throughout Scripture, God continually puts the poor, widows, orphans, and outcasts at the center of his heart and mission (Ps. 68.5, Is. 61.1-4Jer. 22.16).  When Jesus steps on the scene, he defines his mission directly from Isaiah 61 in these terms, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”  And so, Jesus chose these same types of people to walk with him and inaugurate his ministry (I Cor. 1.26-29).  We can conclude that in His ministry, Jesus does not hate, persecute, or practice hypocrisy.

Yet Jesus does not only identify with the outcast in empathy but actually chose to become the outcast.  Hypocrites cast blame, reproach, derision, hate, and horror on others; hypocrites look down their noses, mock, scorn, rebuke, wag fingers and praise themselves.  Instead of sitting beside them, Jesus came and sat beneath them, at the other end of their derision, scorn, and hate.  Hebrews 13.13 tells us that Jesus bore the reproach of others on the cross.  Philippians 2.5-11 tells us that though He deserved all praise and honor, He instead “made Himself nothing” and took the “form of a servant.”  Luke 15.1-2 tells us that Jesus was scorned by the religious people as a lover of sinners and Luke 7.34 shows us that the religious people wagged their finger of condemnation in Jesus’ face, calling him a glutton and a drunkard.  Of course, all the Gospels portray Jesus as not only mocked and derided but actually killed as a victim of religious violence and injustice.  Despite his death in that way, Jesus does not retaliate with fire from heaven as He could have done, but with a plea to God for their forgiveness (Luke 23.34).  Jesus knocks Christian and non-Christian, religious and irreligious alike on their backs.  Jesus knows that all of us, Christian or non-Christian are hypocrites; none of us live up to even our own standards, much less His, and yet He calls us to come to Him to experience His grace, His forgiveness.  He calls us to come and give up our scathing hatred and our distrust and fall into the arms of the only non-hypocrite on the planet, One who endured the pain of hypocrisy, took it on Himself, and now freely gives grace to the moral and the immoral (Luke 15).  How will you respond?

The True Gospel is Anti-Religion.  Many of us have read the scathing critiques of religion and its adherents offered by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as well as those coming from our neighbors. However, what is shocking to most people is that even a cursory reading of the Prophets, Gospels, or Epistles will show that God hates hypocrisy more than any non-Christian ever could.  Jesus routinely condemns external morality and self-righteousness, saving his harshest words for those who take the speck out of others’ eyes while a log remains stuck in their own eye (Matthew 7.5).  Listen to Amos (an ancient prophet):  I hate, I despise your [religious] feasts, I take no delight in your solemn assemblies (5.21).  For another example, look at Matthew 23, a place where Jesus upbraids the religious leaders of the day for their blatant hypocrisy.  His opening words give us the very definition of hypocrisy:  "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you-but not what they do.  For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”  There’s no problem with their teaching; it’s the non-practice of the teaching that is the problem, namely the neglecting of the weightiest matters of the law, “justice, mercy, and faithfulness (23.23).”  Jesus then pronounces ‘woes’ or curses on them, calling them ‘children of hell,’ ‘blind guides,’ ‘fools,’ ‘greedy,’ ‘self-indulgent,’ ‘white-washed tombs,’ ‘serpents,’ and ‘brood of vipers.’  Can you imagine a more scathing contemporary critique of Christian hypocrisy that Jesus Himself offers?  Therefore, if you are a critic of religious hypocrisy, you can’t reject Jesus on that basis—Jesus is with you.

This is why Jesus scandalously says that the religious hypocrite has no claim on me (Matt. 7.21-23).  What does Jesus tell the religious people?  “Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and prostitutes go into the Kingdom of God before you (Matt. 21.31).”  In other words, the pimps and prostitutes will get it before the moral and religious people do. 

So, what is the solution here?  In the words of Tim Keller, the solution to the problem of Christian hypocrisy is not less Christianity, but a deeper and truer Christianity:  “When Martin Luther King, Jr. confronted terrible abuses by the white churches in the South, he did not call them to loosen their Christian commitments. He did not say, religion has become the opium of the people; he did not say give up your moral standards; he did not say to loosen or give up our Christian beliefs.  That would have never produced the change for which he was fighting.  He used the Bible’s own provision for self-critique and called them to truer, firmer, deeper Christianity.”  He called them to really live Christ’s call to protect the innocent, to see the image of God in all races, and to identify with the poor, oppressed, and marginalized.  The solution then, is for Christians to go back to the heart of their Christian faith:  a man who died a victim of injustice and preached good news to the poor.  Any system of thought or belief must be judged on its own merits, not on the failure of its more wayward “citizens.”

As an example, let’s say you have a friend whose hero is Lebron James.  Your friend admires Lebron so much that he dresses like Lebron, records his commercials, uses the training equipment Lebron uses, and even practices on the same court as Lebron.  Then let’s say you go out to play some basketball with your friend, and he only scores 2 points over the course of 4 pick up games.  It would be absurd for you to then conclude that, since your friend imitates and follows Lebron, and your friend stinks at basketball, then it is absolutely the case that Lebron too must stink at basketball?  No, the way you judge Lebron’s game is on the basis of how Lebron plays the game, not his imitators. In like manner, it is wrong to reject Christianity until you have encountered Christ directly—this does not excuse Christians’ hypocrisy.  But neither does it excuse skeptics from giving Christianity a good, hard, honest look at Christianity on the basis of what Jesus’ claims are about himself, and whether or not he lived a life that backs up those claims.

Please note that the 3 entries on hypocrisy are adapted and developed on work from the Rev. Scott Sauls

We don’t have to look far to see how badly Christians have stumbled.  Many Christians supported the Inquisition, slavery, racism, apartheid, etc.  But what is more evident today is the smug, self-righteousness, condemning attitude whereby many Christians look down their noses at an “immoral culture in freefall,” and conclude that the only solution is to declare “war” on the surrounding culture.  In addition, all of us know the regular church-goers and Bible thumpers who practice the very things they condemn (see Jimmy Swaggert, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, and Ted Haggard for examples).  Hypocrites tend to be very strong on rules and very hard on people who break them.  They will even shame publicly those who fail at the rules (John 8:3-5), usually under the guise of “teaching everyone a good lesson about sin.”  Then we see in John 8:5-6 that hypocrites both want to execute an adulteress and accuse Jesus because they think he is too soft on sin.  There is a real rush that comes from rejecting and excluding others who don’t measure up to the rules that the hypocrite holds dear.  This is precisely how religious, hypocritical communities justify themselves—they bolster their own egos by positioning themselves to take pride in their own performance and look down with disdain at the failure of others (Luke 18:9-14).  It may be compared to how some dog trainers teach a dog not to pee indoors—when a dog pees on the carpet (and thus fails at the “rules”) the trainer will rub the dog’s face in the mess until the dog is shamed into compliance.

Christian author Philip Yancey, who speaks often with non-Christians about their perception of Christians, almost 100% of the time hears the objection that Christians (unlike Jesus) are narrow-minded, condemning, and exclusive.  Mahatma Gandhi, when asked why he had rejected Christ, replied, “It is not Christ I reject.  It is Christians. I see so few of them living like their master.” This same principle led Karl Marx to his famous conclusion:  “Religion is the opium of the people.”  Christians must listen respectfully to these commentaries.  There indeed have been terrible abuses “in the name of Christ,” which have failed miserably to reflect the real Jesus, who is “full of grace and truth.”  The very fact that so few Christian churches experience the dynamic of “sinners” flocking to them on a regular basis (as was the case with Jesus ), should give Christians pause, and a good reason to take a hard look in the mirror.

I will address these abuses in the next two entries but any Christian’s first response should be repentance.  We should own our past and present mistakes as well as our love of self-righteousness.  I personally have failed to represent Christ well and want to plead for forgiveness from my non-Christian friends and neighbors.  I hope that they will look through me (or past me) to see Jesus as He really is.  So, for Christians, the initial step in the dialogue must not be to defend themselves but rather to repent.   In the next two entries, we’ll see if Christianity has more of a response than repentance but I believe it is the necessary first step.

Note that these 3 entries adapted and developed from work by Rev. Scott Sauls of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, NYC

As our culture has shifted further and further toward secularism, the cultural battles have become more intense.  But what Nietzsche failed to see was that his own statement was a truth claim.  He could not see that a world bereft of truth leaves the field wide-open to power plays.  Without a truth claim, Martin Luther King Jr. would have never changed our country—he appealed specifically to the Christian truth that oppression and injustice were products of and rooted in sin, and therefore should be overturned.  Without truth, the powerful become the truth, the weak and poor are run down and trampled under foot.  We all agree that we are tired of the bickering, anger, pride, and divisiveness, but ridding ourselves of truth will only open the door to a new tyranny, a more dangerous one because with truth dead, there will be no weapons to battle it.  So, how can we have peace and harmony while still loving truth?  Let me give you 3 quick resources that Christianity possesses, resources that are unique to Christianity (though I admit sadly that Christians have taken the Gospel seriously in this respect):

First, the Method of Christianity leads to humility—In every other religion, you’re saved by performance, meaning that superiority abounds, but the Gospel says you’re not saved by your performance; you’re saved by God’s unmitigated grace. This leads us to expect that people who don’t believe as Christians do might very well be better than us.  We’re not saved b/c we’re wise, good, virtuous, or performing the truth; we’re saved because Jesus performed the truth.  Thus, many who don’t believe with us can easily be better people.  The Gospel humbles us before others with whom we disagree.

Second, the Purpose of Christianity leads to service—Every other religion says that this world doesn’t matter and all that does matter is going to heaven while the world is destroyed or escaped (if not heaven, then some other escape from the physical world).  But if Biblical salvation is a physical and renewed “new heavens and a new earth,” where death, poverty, and disease are gone, then Christians are called to work for the peace and renewal of this world.  At its inception, the Greeks marveled that Christians took care not only of their poor, but all the poor, not just their children but every child who needed a home. 

Third, the Origin of Christianity leads to love—When Christianity began to grow in the earliest days, they lived in a world of what looked like inclusive, pluralistic religion—everyone had their own god!  Christians came along and said, “Jesus is Lord of all.”  It seems that this would create division and anger but it actually created the most inclusive society ever known.  Greeks didn’t mix rich and poor, but Christians did.  The Jews didn’t mix the races but the Christians did.  The reason behind this is that ultimate reality is visible in Jesus Christ, and this ultimate reality is always about a man on a cross loving people who don’t love him, forgiving people who abuse him, and sacrificially serving people who oppose him.  The empire of Jesus is not coercive for it is built on the sacrificial death of its king.  The truth we proclaim is not a function of coercive power but of sacrificial love.  If that’s ultimate reality, how can Christians be cruel, coercive, or condescending to anyone?  We can’t. 

The first window I would open here is to see that not stopping suffering is a question of which God Himself has faced the pain.  In Luke 23.35-38, the Bible records something amazing to me.  Notice what the crowd cries out to Jesus, “He saved others; let him save Himself, if He is the Christ of God, His chosen one.  If you are the king of the Jews, then save yourself!”  They are calling on him, not to stop the suffering of the world but to stop His own suffering.  They are mocking the God who has ‘chosen’ Him for not stopping the blood-letting.  Does God have the power to stop it?  Of course, remember his statement in Matthew 26.53, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”  In other words, more than 60,000 angels with flaming swords would be at His bleeding side in a moment if He called them.  Now put yourself in the Father’s place, watching your Son be tortured, hearing Him scream out, seeing the mocking, watching Him rise to gasp for air only to slide back down again breathless, hearing Him be rejected, and observing His death, all while you had the power to send more than 12 legions of angels to His side. 

You better believe if that were my son, I would move heaven and earth to be there; I would be an unstoppable force to armies, soldiers, bystanders, and weapons.  And yet God watched on; Jesus died on.  Many rail against a God who “refuses” to stop the suffering of earthly innocents, but God Himself has faced the reality of not stopping His own suffering infinitely more powerfully than we ever will b/c He not only allows suffering to continue in our world but He allowed it for His own Son.  We face the pain of powerless suffering, where we have little control over the situation, but God faced the pain of powerful suffering, that is, suffering with the full power to end it and yet letting it continue in horror.  There would have to be an amazing reason to do something like that, and there is.  He did that for the infinitely valuable result of the salvation of you, me, and all of creation.  Christianity is the only religion that gives us a God who is not removed from suffering but comes and Himself takes on the suffering that should have been mine and should have been yours.  He does not require your blood but provides His own.  John Stott says that he personally could not believe in God if not for the cross where the One who is all powerful humbles Himself and suffers a type of punishment that you and I will never experience.  So, we don’t know for sure what the reason for suffering is but we know what it isn’t, what it can’t be.  It can’t be b/c He doesn’t love us; it can’t be b/c He doesn’t care; it can’t be b/c He’s aloof.  God loves us and hates suffering so much that He was willing to come down and get involved in it personally.

Consider the universal desire to name things as wrong in the world. I have never met anyone—whether religious or not—who said, “I think what Hitler did was fine for him even if I personally think it is bad” or “the genocide in Rwanda is totally fine with me” or “child abuse is a just another personal preference for anyone.”  Everyone I have ever met looks at those situations with repulsion, calls them ‘evil,’ and most would even work actively against them.  Sounds fine, but the question is, where does the atheist get the moral compass to call such activities evil.  One might say just plain common sense but why does that ‘common sense’ not exist for the perpetrators of the evils mentioned above?  If there, is no ‘god,’ why posit certain standards for good and evil?  If there is no god, there are only personal preferences, and though I wouldn’t prefer for Hitler to destroy Western Europe and commit genocide, I have no moral basis to stop him.  

Of course, we might think…we get our morality from nature.  There is no ‘god,’ but we just observe the ‘common sense’ of nature and then act accordingly.  One such person who tried this was the very famous Annie Dillard.  She moved by a creek in Virginia to observe the serenity of nature and form her life to it.  Listen to her description: 

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me or any one!  I had thought to live by the side of the creek in order to shape my life to its  free flow.  But I seem to have reached a point where I must draw the line.  I must part ways with the only world I know…Look: the robin may die the most gruesome of slow deaths, and nature is no less pleased.  The sun comes up, the creek rolls on, the survivors still sing.  But I cannot feel that way about your death nor you about mine, nor either of us about the robin’s!  We value the individual supremely and nature values him not a whit.  I it looks as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized.  Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak.

Consider that the world is a monster…There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises.  But wait, you say, there is no right or wrong in nature:  right and wrong in a human concept!  Precisely!  We are moral creatures…in a universe that is running on chance and death, careening blindly from nowhere to nowhere, which somehow produced wonderful us…This world runs on chance and death and power but I cherish life and the rights of the weak vs. the strong.  So I crawled by chance out of a sea of amino acids, and now I must whirl around and shake my fist at that sea and cry SHAME!  We little blobs of soft tissue crawling around on this one planet’s skin are right, and the whole universe is wrong.  Or the alternative that nature is fine and our feelings are freakishly amiss.  The frog that the giant water bug sucked had a rush of feeling for about a second before its brain turned to broth.  I however, have been sapped by various strong feeling about the incident almost daily for years….All right then—it is our emotions and values that are amiss.  We are freaks—the world is fine!  Let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state.  We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed.  You first!

Don’t let the length of the quote make you miss what she is saying. We know that the essence of nature is the strong eating the weak (survival of the fittest) and yet we also believe that oppression (Hitler, Rwanda, child abuse, etc.) is wrong.  But if nature is all there is (atheism), then why would it be wrong for strong humans to trample weak ones just like the bug Dillard observed destroying the frog?  How could we believe that nature is in any way abnormal unless there is some standard outside of nature to which we appeal?  If we only believe in nature as is, then we should not be repulsed at the Hitlers and child abusers of the world; rather we should think them normal and natural for they are only products of natures drive for survival of the fittest.  If we have nothing to appeal to but nature, then we lose even the vocabulary to name people and events as evil or unjust.  The Bible however, makes sense of the world because it tells us that the world is created but fallen and that God provides a standard of justice by which we can call injustice exactly what it is and from which we derive our beliefs about suffering and social justice.  It is only by the Christian standard that we say such things, certainly not by nature’s standard.  So, if you believe that nature is violent but believe that humans should not live that way, you are living as if the Biblical God is real.  Therefore, atheism only puts your suffering in a deeper predicament—meaning, you have no right to even feel bereaved or lonely or sad or angry because what you are experiencing is simply natural, nature at work.  It is not wrong, it simply is.  Is it honest to live as if God exists and not acknowledge him? (See Tim Keller’s Preaching Lectures for this content and more)

Back to Christianity…The Bible does not avoid or attempt to sidestep the question of suffering or evil in the world.  The Bible acknowledges the reality that all of us are scarred, all of us are broken, all of us have shed tears of sorrow, all of us have felt sting, pain, and loneliness, and that our world is also reeling from injustice and oppression.  In fact, as The Long Silence showed us in the last entry, we know that God Himself didn’t avoid it—God entered history as a human and suffered the worst pain imaginable.  Listen to the words of Dorothy Sayers: 

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine.  Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair.  He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself.  He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death.  When He was a man, He played the man.  He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while.”  

So, Jesus has suffered, with us, for us, and more than us.  Because He has taken on suffering, pain, and evil AND defeated them (Resurrection), He can transform our smaller suffering and pain into a story of wonder and awe.  This is why the Bible can say in Romans 8.18 that the present sufferings are not worth comparing to the future glory, which in v. 23 he describes as the redemption of our bodies, a physical future (not destruction of the world but restoration) where everything crooked will be made straight, where we will dance like the greatest of dancers, where we will travel like the wealthiest millionaires, where we will sing and play and worship in ways that are unimaginable to us now.  Tim Keller writes, “The Biblical view of things is resurrection – not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.”  

The Bible promises that God’s work in the present leads to a world in the future where, in the words of Sam from Lord of the Rings, every sad thing comes untrue.  This is what is so unique and powerful about Christianity: Jesus did not abolish suffering, he absorbed it; He did not sidestep it, he swallowed it.  He did not stop the crucifixion; He rose from the dead. He took the crown of thorns and in the Resurrection twisted it into a crown of glory; He took the cross of death and in the Resurrection made it into a place of life.  That’s what the Resurrection means for your pain and the pain of the whole world.  Practically speaking, every cross the Christian must bear, every thorn in your flesh, every tear from your eyes will be twisted and remade for your glory, it will be worked for your good—not just consolation but restoration. Any suffering that God allows, we know He has taken His own medicine and therefore not only can empathize with us but He can also change us.  Again Sayers: 

“Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.  That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.  Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as News; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it News, and good news at that; though we are apt to forget that the word ‘Gospel’ ever meant anything so sensational.”

 One of the biggest reasons many refuse to believe in or listen to “God” in our day and age is quite simply the reason of suffering and pain.  As a pastor and as a human being, I have witnessed unmitigated suffering—death, disease, famine, abuse, abandonment, loneliness, tears.  Sometimes, just upon approach, my stomach churns, my heart races, fear sets in.  What will I say?  What does God do or say?  At a hospital bed or in a funeral home, a good God who allows suffering and evil transitions from philosophical conundrum to devastating reality.  In such situations, we are rightly skeptical of pious platitudes or feel good inspiration from smiling pastors or back slapping well-wishers.  Usually, at times of our greatest pain, we only admit an inner circle of people to witness—those who have been wounded like we have, those who have suffered too, those who are broken too.  Those are the people who have the ability to enter our pain because they have been there first, and they are the people with the power to help us down the healing path because they know it well.  It is an ironic truth that only the wounded can really heal. 

Given this reality, most people reason, that since God is apparently enjoying the show in heaven, removed from fear, doubt, pain, financial ruin, disease, and death, He is the last person, if He exists at all, who I would want to consider or trust during suffering.  But consider this little anonymous playlet:

At the end of time, billions of people were seated on a great plain before God's throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly, not cringing with cringing shame - but with belligerence. "Can God judge us? How can He know about suffering?", snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. "We endured terror ... beatings ... torture ... death!"  In another group a Negro boy lowered his collar. "What about this?" he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. "Lynched, for no crime but being black !" In another crowd there was a pregnant schoolgirl with sullen eyes: "Why should I suffer?" she murmured. "It wasn't my fault." Far out across the plain were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering He had permitted in His world.

How lucky God was to live in Heaven, where all was sweetness and light. Where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that man had been forced to endure in this world? For God leads a pretty sheltered life, they said.  So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he had suffered the most. A Jew, a negro, a person from Hiroshima, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the vast plain, they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather clever.  Before God could be qualified to be their judge, He must endure what they had endured. Their decision was that God should be sentenced to live on earth as a man.

Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Give him a work so difficult that even his family will think him out of his mind.  Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him face false charges, be tried by a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured.  At the last, let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Then let him die so there can be no doubt he died. Let there be a great host of witnesses to verify it.  As each leader announced his portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of approval went up from the throng of people assembled. When the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one uttered a word. No one moved.

For suddenly, all knew that God had already served His sentence.

Christianity is the only religion that gives us a God who is not removed from suffering but comes and Himself takes on suffering. So, we don’t know for sure what the reason for suffering is but we know what it isn’t, what it can’t be.  It can’t be b/c He doesn’t love us; it can’t be b/c He doesn’t care.  God loves us and hates suffering so much that He was willing to come down and get involved in it.  If only the wounded can really heal, then Jesus would be the healer supreme.  More on this next time…

Hebrews 10:34-35:  For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.  Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.

Hebrews 12.2:  For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame.

July 1, 2008—Jubilation turned to despair, joy turned to tears, and excitement turned to sadness.  I lay in my bed, still half sick from an internal virus but mainly wondering and crying over tragedy.  My wife had called from the doctor’s office to tell me that the baby we had so prayed and hoped for, the baby who had been formed by God Himself in her womb, the baby who just weeks earlier we were praising God for, the baby who was the cause of all our jubilation had died in the womb—“miscarriage” is the euphemistic way to communicate death in that situation. 

I have been arguing that the true vision of Christianity commands us to pursue our pleasure.  But our world has been cursed by God Himself (Genesis 3, Romans 8) and contains much misery, sorrow, and tragedy, much beyond what I described above.  So then, how is a Christian to pursue pleasure in those situations?  No vision of the Christian life can be complete without taking into account the enormous issue of pain and suffering. 

However, I believe that God must be our greatest delight if we are to endure suffering well.  I say that mainly because the fight of faith, it seems to me, in times of hardship, depression, suffering, and loss is a fight to gain true satisfaction in God, i.e. more satisfaction that you had in the keeping or attaining of that which was lost.  So, my struggle in our miscarriage and loss of our second child was to find God more satisfying than having another child.  It is what Tozer calls "The blessedness of possessing nothing."  The greatest thing the world can see in our suffering is a foundational satisfaction in God-we grieve the loss openly but we also are fighting to see and to show God as bigger, better, and ultimately more satisfying than the thing we lost.  I think we see this pretty clearly in Hebrews 10.34 when the author is talking about the suffering they endured: "You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one."  So their satisfaction in God's provision allowed them to suffer joyfully or as Paul says it, “we are sorrowful yet always rejoicing.”  

You can only be joyful when someone is plundering your property if you take joy at the thought of having a “better possession and an abiding one…a great reward,” namely a place where you and everything else is secure and happy in God for eternity.  Another way to put it is to say that God must be our end and not simply a means to an end.  He must be foundational, not instrumental.  In other words, that which is most valued is our god so we must not use God as an instrument to get what we really want; rather we must see everything else as sacrificable to get what is really best and most delightful—God Himself.  With that in mind we can enter into any period of suffering like Jesus did—for the joy set before Him (Hebrews 12.2).  In my case, as I worked through the sadness that surrounded our miscarriage, I found God to be more sufficient, more enjoyable, and more real than I ever had before.  I have been a little better prepared, equipped, and suited for the “eternal weight of glory” God offers.

I want to close these four weeks with a quote from Lewis’ Screwtape Letters where Lewis imagines a conversation between an older experience demon named Screwtape with his young protégé.  Listen to his advice and take seriously the way Satan wages spiritual warfare in our lives:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s [God’s] ground.  I know we have won many a soul through pleasure.  All the same, it is His Invention, not ours.  He makes the pleasures; all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.  All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at times, or ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden…An ever-increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula…To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father’s [Satan’s] heart.

I Timothy 6.6:  Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment.

Mark 10:28-30:  Peter began to say to him, "See, we have left everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.

Matthew 6:19-20:  Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,  but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 

Luke 12.32:  Fear not little flock [about money], for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.

Hebrews 13.5:  Keep yourself free from the love of money and be content with what you have for He has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

In the fall of 1982 Leadership magazine carried an unsigned article by a pastor who confessed to years of bondage to pornography of the grossest kind.  He had tried desperately to free himself of this addiction but every attempt at discipline, accountability, and willpower failed him and left his heart further entrenched to his lusts.[1]

For the last two weeks we’ve been talking about God’s command for us to pursue our own pleasure.  Seemingly, that ‘s what this pastor was doing—going hardcore after pleasure.  This of course would severely misconstrue my meaning.  On the contrary, it is the pursuit of pleasure in God, and only that pursuit, that will free the bound pastor and you and me.  Last week we saw that pursuing pleasure in God levels our pride and makes us desperate for him.  This week we will see that it is to be our strongest basis for battling sin.

Why do you and I sin?  Do you get up in the morning and say, “Well, I didn’t get enough sin in yesterday, I better ratchet up my efforts today?”  Of course not.  Nobody sins out of duty; we sin because sin makes promises for our delight and pleasure.  We sin because we are tempted with a different way to joy, pleasure, and excitement.  The sin makes us go after it so that we can have what it promises—wealth, status, sex, relationship, whatever.  Such pleasures are very entrenched in our hearts.  For instance, if you are addicted to pornography or if you love money, then it is impossible to wake up in the morning and simply will those things out of your heart and mind.  It can’t happen.  However, if there is a greater pleasure to be gained than money and greater beauty to be gazed upon than naked women and men, then your head can be turned.  The great pastor Thomas Chalmers called this the “Expulsive Power of a New Affection.”  Translation:  Only a new and better love can expel an old love.  So, if you’re in love with your status in the world, then the only real way to change is to have that love of self be expelled by a love of something greater.  We are slow to take up the forsaking of our sins unless God makes us better promises, and that’s exactly what He does!

If God is our delight, we can battle sin.  Instead of looking to the weak promises of sin to fulfill us, we are called to see the superior promises and joys offered by God.  Notice above in Matthew 6.19-20, Luke 12.32, and Hebrews 13.5 how God teaches us to fight for pleasure in Him instead of money.  He doesn’t just say, “don’t love money.”  He doesn’t even just say it with warning, “You know money will destroy you, right?”  He says that you fight sin with the superior pleasure that comes from Him.  We don’t keep treasures here because they may not last, instead God offers better treasures that nothing can destroy (Matt. 6).  We do not have to fear losing our money because God takes pleasure in giving His entire Kingdom to His children (Luke 12).  We can be free from loving money because God has promised never to leave us.  If He will be with us no matter what, then money loses its importance.  It is more pleasurable to have God than to have money (Hebrew 13)!

How about pornography and the pastor above?  After years of addiction, it was Matthew 5.8 that finally released Him, concluding that there is only one reason to seek purity, the one Christ Himself gives:  “Blessed (Happy) are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  The pastor himself said it this way: 

The thought hit me like a bell rung in a dark, silent hall.  So far, none of the scary, negative arguments against lust had succeeded in keeping me from it…But here was a description of what I was missing by continuing to harbor lust:  I was limiting my own intimacy with God.  The love he offers is so transcendent and possessing that it requires our faculties to be purified and cleansed before we can possibly contain it.  Could he, in fact, substitute another thirst and another hunger for the one I had never filled?  Would Living Water somehow quench lust?  That was the gamble of faith.

We can only fight sin like lust by latching on to the promises of superior pleasure that the pure in heart will see the glorious God face to face.  Therefore,

Faith is not content with ‘fleeting pleasures.’  It is ravenous for joy.  And the Word of God says, ‘In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.’  Thus, our aim is not merely to avoid the negative, but to gain the excellent…The challenge before us in our fight against lust is not merely do what God says because He is God, but to desire what God says because He is glorious.  The challenge is not merely to pursue righteousness, but to prefer righteousness.[2]

[1] As told by John Piper, Battling Unbelief, 145-146.

[2] Ibid.

I Corinthians 1.28-31:  God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."

I Corinthians 4.7:  For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?

Last week, I said that the Bible gives us a much more radical vision of Christian life, namely that God commands and calls us to seek our pleasure in Him.  This week, I want to say just one way this makes a difference to you.

The command to delight in God or to pursue our pleasure in Him levels pride and makes us desperate for Him.  I used to think of my relationship with God like this:  If I get up in the morning, have a time of devotion, pray, follow the 10 commandments as best I could through the day, and end the day with some prayer, then I’ve had a pretty good day and satisfied God.  I am convinced that this view of God has killed or is killing our drive, passion, fear, trembling, reverence, joy, and love for God.  It is creating generations of apathetic and complacent Christians by turning God from the majestic, beautiful, glorious, radiant, self-sufficient center of the universe to a to-do list that we check off when possible.  As long as we checked off the list for today we can be assuaged of our guilt and continue on practically as if God did not exist.  As we get better and better at our checklist, we become prouder and prouder of how we have “served” God.  Now, that may be religion but it is not Christianity.  Christianity does not say that I am living to “satisfy God;” in fact is says the opposite—God’s desire is to satisfy us with Himself forever and ever (see Psalm 90.14 for just one reference to this).  Christianity says that Jesus has already satisfied God because it was a task you and I could never complete.  Therefore, God will not be merely placated by us like some tribal deity, He will be worshipped, honored, glorified, and enjoyed!  

Do you see how God’s command to delight in Him destroys our pride?  See, if I take my wife out to dinner and then smugly think to myself that I am a good husband for taking my time from my busy schedule to satisfy her demands, then I become prideful in myself, resentful of her if she doesn’t respond or reciprocate, and passionless in my love for her.  But if I take her to dinner because I love and enjoy her company and I thoroughly enjoy the evening, then what do I have to be prideful about?  I simply enjoyed the pleasure of her presence!  So it is with God.  If our obedience is pleasure, we can never take pride in it.  This is why the verses noted above show clearly that the gift of salvation and the preciousness of knowing Christ is a gift from God, not something we create, earn, or merit.  If God gave you a good gift, it is all of Him and your only boast should be in His goodness and all satisfying sufficiency.  He is the fountain and giver of life.

Seeking our pleasure in God also makes us desperate.  We all recognize pretty quickly and clearly how terribly we fail the test to “love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.”  We might have bare obedience, but few of us have transformed affections that everyday take greater pleasure in God’s presence than in the gifts he gives.  Many of us are following the commandments of God, but this is short of the commandments themselves!  The command is to delight in the Lord (Psalm 37.4) and to love mercy (Micah 6.8) not just to obey and do.  For instance, I might be able to convince you to obey my command to give me $10.  It may take some coercing but I could probably convince you.  But how would I convince you to delight in giving me $10?  I can’t.  So, we see quickly that this command raises the bar much higher, and while it removes any ground for boasting, it also makes us desperate because such a gift can only come from God Himself.  “He will give you the desires of your heart (Ps. 37.4).”  When we see what God truly requires, we will become people desperate in prayer to receive from God’s hand all He is and all He has to offer.

So, let God’s command to delight in Him and Jesus’ purpose to give you His joy shoot an arrow into your view of faith in Jesus.  Where are you trying merely to placate God?  How have you treated Him like a to-do list?  Have you lost your passion and desire for Him?  Are you desperate for Him or just desperately trying to stay afloat with bare obedience?  In what areas of your life are you boasting of your goodness?  Let this command, renew you by leveling your pride and making you humble to beg the Holy Spirit for changed affections, for new feelings, for greater longings after God in Christ.  Once you are desperate for Him, he will answer your call, give you His joy, and invigorate your passion for Him.

Psalm 34.8:  Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!

Psalm 36.8:  They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

Psalm 37.4:  Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 63.3:  Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you

Psalm 90.14:  Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.

John 15:11:  These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

A great lie has been perpetrated about God, Jesus, and Christianity for some time now.  It has gained credence nationwide and is even widely accepted now in most Christian circles.  Here is the lie:  When it comes to how you live your life, you must choose between happiness and holiness; you must choose between righteousness and pleasure; you must choose between delight and duty; you must choose between following Jesus and enjoying life.  The world outside the church often views God as the big party-pooper in the sky ready to crush fun with a single command, while the people inside the church often view him as the big ogre in the sky, ready at a moment’s notice to cast down lightening bolts for our slightest missteps.  Just a cursory glance at the verses above yields a vision of faith and the God of faith far superior to the drudgery and duty religion I grew up with (maybe many of you too!).  We’ve somehow inherited a view of Christianity that says that if we take any joy in doing the right thing, then we have spoiled the good of our actions, but this is patently unchristian, because God, who created our desires, continually appeals to them in the Scriptures. But didn’t’ Jesus call us to deny ourselves (Matt. 16.24-26)?  Yes, but note the oft-quoted passage from Lewis:

“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.  We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.  If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem  that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.”

You see, a Christian view of self-denial is not one of drudgery but one of denying yourself the lesser pleasure for the greater.  Jesus Himself poses it this way—If you lose your life, you will find it!  Listen to how he appeals to us with His question:  “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”  In other words, even if you have to deny yourself the whole world right now, you are only gaining because you will keep your soul for eternity. 

Doesn’t seeking your own happiness sound self-centered? Aren't Christians supposed to seek God, not their own pleasure? “To answer this question we need to understand a crucial truth about pleasure-seeking: we value most what we delight in most. Pleasure is not God's competitor, idols are. Pleasure is simply a gauge that measures how valuable someone or something is to us. Pleasure is the measure of our treasure.” (John Piper)

As an illustration of this, suppose you have a daughter and a man comes to ask for her hand in marriage.  Suppose he tells you that your daughter is the prize of his life, his treasure, that his joy in only complete in her joy, that though he might lose everything else in the world if he still has her it will be sufficient, that her very presence is satisfying and in her he finds the greatest heights of pleasure and delight?  Would you think that his pleasure in her disqualifies him from marrying her or somehow makes him selfish?  Of course not.  What we recognize very quickly in this illustration is that there is a way to pursue your joy in someone that honors that person and a way to pursue your joy in someone that dishonors the person.  We want to pursue our joy in God in the way that honors him by showing forth His sufficiency and greatness.

From Screwtape, the mentor demon to Wormwood, his young disciple:  “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground.  I know we have won many a soul through pleasure.  All the same, it is His Invention, not ours.  He makes the pleasures; all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.  All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at times, or ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden…An ever-increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula…To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father’s [Satan’s] heart.”

Abraham and his wife Sarah (who we meet in Genesis 11-25) certainly knew about that.  They held onto their dream, not for months or years but for decades—for decades they longed for and dreamed about the day when they would have a little baby of their own.  If you know the story, you know that Abraham was first Abram, meaning ‘exalted father.’  When he met someone, they would always want to know where exalted father’s children were but he would have to respond, “I have none.”  You mean your name is exalted father and you don’t have anyone to father?  “No, my wife is barren.”  For years, his own name, every time it rang in his ears, issued pain and dealt another blow to their dream.  Some of you know the pain they felt, the pain of childlessness, the shame of barrenness, the loss of miscarriage—there is little pain like it. 

But in Genesis 12 something changed drastically—Abe heard the voice of God and God promised him not just a son but that he would be the father of a great nation. So, God changed his name to Abraham, meaning father of a multitude.  And the dream was revived.  A glimmer of hope flickered through his heart.  You ever had that happen where you thought a dream was dead but then it is reignited by a spark, you thought it was over but then hope returns.  That’s what God did for Abe and Sarah.  Sure they were already pretty old to be having kids (75 and 65) but it wasn’t completely unheard of, right?  It could happen.  Fast forward 24 years—Abe and Sarah are still praying for that promised child, the child God promised would make a great nation, the child through whom God promised to bless all the nations.  Still praying, but mostly weeping—the dream had been broken again.  It seemed that God had again laid waste their dreams—all their lives they had wanted one thing, and God had not delivered.  When God reaffirmed His promise, the Bible tells us that Sarah laughed; she laughed in the face of God; she laughed a laugh of sarcasm and cold bitterness; she laughed a laugh of unbelief in the very face of God.  Very often God, in His mercy, will lay waste to our smaller and lesser dreams so that He can, in His mercy, give us His bigger and greater dreams.  Therefore, all God’s actions toward His children, no matter how painful, are always merciful.  Remember, God never only takes; He takes in order to give.  He never only empties; He empties in order to fill; He never only tears; He tears in order to mend; He never only removes; He removes in order to bestow.  Often the greatest things in our lives are born out of the greatest pain.  God loves to bring life from death, joy from weeping, and resurrection from crucifixion.  That is what the Easter season is all about.

Such was the case with Abe and Sarah.  She laughed in God’s face but God had the last laugh; one year later she gave birth to her first child.  They named him Isaac which means laughter.  God had turned her laughter of cold, sarcastic bitterness to warm, loving joy.  Have you recently felt your heart grow cold or resentment rise up due to a dream laid waste, a desire unfulfilled, a need that has gone unmet, or an injustice not rectified?  Maybe you’ve laughed in the very face of God like A & S.  I want to encourage you that God loves to bring life from death, joy from bitterness, and laughter from pain.  In all of our lives, stripping will come, a time will come where what is most important to us is taken away—our health, our looks, our sex appeal, some relationship, our money, our security, our family, up until our very life.  Our world, in and of itself, offers no foundations—God is the only sure foundation.  As Tim Keller has said of a working definition of God, “God is the only non-negotiable.”  In other words, anything and everything else can be lost in life; there is no other end in life, and there is nothing else so foundational about the universe.  He is all that will be left when the moment of stripping comes, and He will be more than enough 

What would it mean for you to think that the Christian God is a happy God, a God who takes pleasure in all that He does?

[1] See The Pleasures of God by John Piper for these and other references

[2] Many translations such as the ESV have softened God’s pleasure to His “will,” but the Hebrew word literally means “to take pleasure or delight in.”

The prophet Micaiah stood against all the prophets of Ahab and said that the king would fall in battle. To explain why all the other prophets were saying the opposite, Micaiah says, “Now therefore behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the Lord has declared disaster for you” (1 Kings 22:23).

Similarly, God says he will punish those who try to use prophets to buttress their sin. In that situation he says, “If the prophet is deceived and speaks a word, I, the Lord, have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel. And they shall bear their punishment—the punishment of the prophet and the punishment of the inquirer shall be alike” (Ezekiel 14:9-10).

And at the end of this age, God will ordain a “strong delusion” as part of the punishment for those who “refused to love the truth.” “The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12).

When we say that God never lies, but ordains that lying happen, we do not mean that he approves of lying or that his law permits lying. We mean that God governs all things in the universe, including the sins of sinful men. Sin does not cease to be sin because God governs it and guides it for the good of his people and the glory of his name.

That is what he did in the sin of Joseph’s deceptive sale into Egypt—and Judas’ deceptive kiss of betrayal. The one led to the greatest act of salvation in the Old Testament (the Exodus from Egypt), and the other led to the greatest act of salvation in history (the death of Christ for our sins).

When God says, “I have deceived that prophet” (Ezekiel 14:9), he means that he can and does govern a sinful prophet’s mind so that the prophet believes a lie; but God does it in such a way that he himself is not lying. God is able to superintend a thousand circumstances and influences so that a sinful prophet will think a lie, without God himself lying or in any way compromising his perfect truthfulness.  Let the word of God about the word of God stand firm:

“God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Numbers 23:19).

“The Glory of Israel will not lie” (1 Samuel 15:29).

“The word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.” (Psalms 33:4).

“This God—his way is perfect; the word of the Lord proves true” (2 Samuel 22:31).

“Every word of God proves true” (Proverbs 30:5).

“The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Psalms 12:6).

God can be trusted. But do not play games with him. Do not begin to be careless with the truth. Do not “take pleasure in unrighteousness” and forsake the “love of the truth.” If you do, you may be abandoned to a strong delusion and never be able to see again.

For God’s truth and your safety,

Pastor John

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I struggled to make sense of that quote for quite some time but now I have begun to wrap my mind around it.  A religious person believes that if he/she avoids sin enough then God owes them or He will have to bless them or something to that effect.  In other words, if I’m a good enough person, then I don’t really need Jesus at all; I don’t really have to encounter Him or do any business with Him—why would I, I’m good enough already.  Moral or religious people have a habit of giving lip service to Jesus while actually believing that they never really need Him. 

In contrast, true Christians know that our world isn’t filled with good and bad people of whom we are the “good.”  Instead the world is filled with bad people and we are numbered with them.  This is why I can’t “avoid” Jesus.  I need Him.  I need His life, His death, and His resurrection to be mine so that my evil can be paid for.  I don’t want to avoid Jesus by pretending to be good; I want to encounter Him by admitting to be evil. 

Of course, it is a scary thing to admit such sin before a holy God because our likely fear is that if we admit the truth then that holy God will strike us down.  For religion, this would be true but nothing could be farther from the truth in Christianity.  Jesus rejects the religious and welcomes the wayward.  That’s why he tells the religious people of His day that “The prostitutes and tax collectors go into the Kingdom of God before you do (Matt. 21.31).”  Later in Scripture, Jesus’ disciple John tells us “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” but if we don’t then “we make Him a liar and His word is not in us (I John 1.9-10).” 

Jesus demonstrates this dramatically in Luke 18.9-14 where He pictures two men praying, one a religious Pharisee who looks down his nose at all the “bad” people who aren’t as good as him and one a tax collector (read:  traitor against God and man) who beats his chest, refuses to even lift his eyes up to heaven and proclaims, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner!”  Jesus concludes His comments thus, “I tell you the truth, this man [the tax collector] went down to his house justified, rather than the other.  For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Don’t get caught confusing Christianity with religion and thus rejecting something out of hand before you understand it and don’t get caught being a religious person while thinking you are being a Christian.  Only one man will “go down to his house justified” before God.

The mounting loss of trust and confidence in the “gods” of our culture means that a toppling is occurring.  That in which so many have trusted for their satisfaction and security is demonstrably bankrupt and without power to give life.  The path of meaning, purpose, and direction thousands have followed looks remarkably like a dead end. 

The only good news about dead ends, of course, is that they mean new beginnings.  When you’re on a trip and hit a dead end, you must confess that you have gone the wrong way, turn around and look for the right path.  As other paths become dead ends, it seems that Jesus differentiates Himself among the “gods.”  Jesus is like the secret opening at each dead end—when one path shows itself deficient, that deficiency merely highlights the very sufficiency Jesus longs to prove.  Consider a few things:

When talking about money, Jesus tells us, “Fear not little flock, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom (Luke 12.32).”  Notice how different Jesus is than the other “gods” we love:

If this is a true picture of God, and I believe it is, then we can be free of fear (“Fear not”) that the downed economy brings and we can put our time, talents, and treasure in places where the rate of return is unfailing.  God is different than the “gods” of our culture—He will not harshly demand but He will freely give.  For many of you, this economy has brought you to a dead end of sorts, and I wonder if you’d consider looking past the dead end to a “secret opening” which Jesus gladly holds wide for you, an opening that would lead to the true God and to abundant life (Psalm 16.11, John 10.10)?

As I thought about this, I came to see that it is a great promise that almost anyone, whether they believe in Jesus or not, will want to be true.  However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this promise is unique to Christianity.  This desire for a world filled with justice, peace, love, fulfillment, joy, wonder, and pleasure (God’s promised future) is built into us. Innately, instinctively we want the promise of God’s future to be true.  But ONLY Christianity really promises this.  Politics only promises us a better way to fail; atheism promises only unknowing darkness after death; science, the 20th and 21st centuries’ great progresses promises a future where the sun burns out and everything on the earth atrophies and dies; even other religions only promise something like eternal consciousness or spiritual existence as an angel playing a harp on a cloud. 

Now, many of you and many of your friends, who are not Christian, care deeply about social issues like poverty, environmental justice, world hunger, dealing with genocide and AIDS, etc.  Yet you believe at a more fundamental level that the world was caused by accident and that eventually everything in the earth will simply die with the death of the sun.  If you care at all about justice or any of these or other social issues, then such a worldview will not fit.  If everything will be destroyed in the end, why work so hard now to save anything?  On the other hand, if God is at work renewing all of creation, then we have the impetus to join Him now in His work.  Only if the promise of Christianity is true do we have any reason to hope for the future and any reason to help in the present.  

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."                    -C.S. Lewis

So, how does all this relate to our money?  Well, the assumption is that Jesus is a money killjoy because wants us to give away all our money so we can be as miserable as possible.  But this is false.  As I said last time, Jesus wants us to be free from a love of money so that we can have what is better.  Let’s try to illustrate this:  Let’s say you are a singer who enjoys nothing more than singing and performing your music before adoring audiences.  Let’s also say that you like to drink diet colas.  The problem is, as any vocalist can tell you, is that carbonated and caffeinated drinks will ruin your singing voice.  Now would it or would it not make sense to give up what is smaller, your love of coke, to enjoy the pleasure of what is greater, your singing?  This is what God says about money—would it not be foolish for you to ruin what I would give you as your greatest pleasure to have the smaller, lesser, diminishing, fleeting pleasures of money? 

Notice how Jesus tells us this in Luke 12.32 as he talks about a love of money.  “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.  Therefore, sell your possessions and give to the needy.”  Have you ever thought about what makes God glad, what gives Him pleasure?  Well, here’s one thing that He thoroughly enjoys—giving to you.  According to that verse, it’s not just His pleasure but His good pleasure.  He is not like an employer paying wages because by law he has to (well, you’ve earned it).  Instead, he actually delights in giving gifts to you, in sustaining you in Him. 

If you want to be liberated from the enslaving greed and fear that come with money, then spend some time thinking about this verse.  You are able to “sell your possessions and give to the needy” because you’re not afraid that God will hang you out to dry; you can be confident that He will joyfully sustain you—it is His good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.  To use an analogy from C.S. Lewis, don’t be so easily pleased.  Don’t settle for making mudpies in a slum when an all inclusive beach vacation is on offer.  What if the money, for which you’re rejecting God right now, is just a mudpie in comparison to the beach vacation that God would give you if you trusted Him?

As I said in the previous post, if you want your heart to be somewhere or for something, then put your treasure there so that it will follow (Matthew 6.21-24).  Most people spend their time waiting on their heart to simply change on its own, as if it’s a light bulb that will simply turn off at some point when it blows.  So we reason with ourselves, “When my heart changes, then I’ll start to put my money there.”  But Jesus knows how self-deceptive money actually is so he reasons in the exact opposite way:  “Invest your money in God’s purposes and then your heart will change.”  This will be the scariest step because we feel we are making a risky investment if our heart is not “into” that kind of thing yet.  But what Jesus is promising is that our heart will begin to respond on the back end, that we will actually get joy, satisfaction, and contentment (the actual enjoyment of money—yes, God wants you to really enjoy it!) to a much greater degree by giving it away than if we kept it for ourselves. 

So, it may seem that Jesus and his church is always asking for money and guilting people into donating.  But the reality is that Jesus doesn’t work like that at all.  He is actually offering you a much better deal than anyone else—put your money somewhere where it can never erode, where the investment multiplies exponentially, and where you can actually enjoy it!  He wants to make you happier and more content about money than you have ever been in your life.  When we do that, we will get the joy from it and the world will get the picture as to what our real treasure in life actually is.  As it is now, the church seems no different than the world in its priorities and therefore they conclude that Jesus is not much of a treasure after all, since money is seemingly better and more valuable.  However, when we give it away, we show that there is something better—Jesus Himself. 

So, the basic idea here is that Jesus doesn’t want us guilty; he wants us free!  He wants us to be free from the fear of losing it, free from the need for the comfort and security it provides, free from its enslaving power to consume all of our lives around its call.  So, if we want to be free from the bondage of materialism, greed, fear, security, and comfort, then we must learn to give sacrificially.  This type of giving not only demonstrates our freedom; it grants it as well.  The more we give, the more we purposefully break off the yoke of slavery which money places so heavily upon us.  Next time, more on what God will give us in place of slavery, fear, and greed…

Jesus has lots of comments that would be pertinent here but I just want to give you two.  Whether you’re a Christian or not, this is true for you:

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matt. 6.21)

No man can serve two masters.  You cannot serve God and money.  (Matt. 6.24)

 This is a bit more diagnosis before the cure, but notice the relevance of Jesus’ words.  Your heart will always follow your treasure.  If  money and/or possessions are your treasure, then it has captured your heart.  Your heart will follow; it is captive to the treasure.  That means your desires, affections, longings, wants, etc. are built around money and possessions.  The second statement shows that all of us have a master.  Notice that word ‘serve.’  It doesn’t say you can’t love God and money or you can’t enjoy God and money; it says ‘serve.’  If money is your treasure you serve it—it is the master and you are the slave.  According to Jesus you are enslaved to do its bidding.  This does not mean that you serve the needs of money as if an intangible object has needs.  It means that you are enslaved to needing money in order to be satisfied, fulfilled, competent, and happy.  In the same way that we seek to rely on (or “serve”) money, God calls us to rely on Him as our help, satisfaction, joy, fulfillment, etc.  So, Jesus is clear to say that money enslaves us, either by fear or by greed.  We’re greedy to have more and fearful of losing that which we’ve already gained. 

Now, how can one change?  Of course, this supposes that someone wants to change.  Many will say they are very happy with their master/slave relationship with money, thank you very much.  That may be true to a degree, but if all of us are honest we will admit that another statement of Jesus in this passage is true:  “Do not lay up for yourselves treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal.”  Of course it is true and beyond argument that none of us can take our money with us when we die.  We will lose it all at that point.  And of course it is true, as most of us realize with this recession, that what we do have can be gone in the snap of a finger (thieves break in and steal).  But what is often not recognized in Jesus’ words is the fact that the enjoyment of those things are also lost or eaten away (moth and rust destroy).  If we’re honest, we know that once we get that thing we’ve sought after for so long, it quickly loses its luster and we become dissatisfied again, and move on to the next thing to seek after.  But as long as we are the slave and money is the master, the moth and rust will destroy; it will eat away the long-term enjoyment.  We will be like children at Christmas who finally get that toy they’ve been talking about for months, and before the day is out, they’ve thrown it in the corner to find a new thrill. 

Ok, I’ll ask the question for a third time, how can we change?  Well, I want to answer that question over a few entries but I will leave you with two hints from the verse above—1) If you’re not yet a Christian and if you want to change, ask yourself what your real treasure is.  That sounds all religious, but what do you value, admire, long for, work for, sweat for, fight for?  The answer to that question will tell you what you worship and as Jesus says, where your heart is (what you’re “in to”).  Tell God that you don’t want to be enslaved to money anymore and that you want Him to be the One whom you admire, value, treasure, and fight for.  2) If you are a Christian, one of the ways you can begin to change is to give more money away to the church, the poor, kingdom purposes, etc.  If you put your treasure in heaven, then your heart will follow (where your treasure is, there your heart will be also).  Your heart cannot be in heaven if you put all your treasure on earth; it is a Biblical impossibility.  Start putting your treasure in the right place and the heart will run after it.  The more vested interest you have in the Kingdom, the more your heart seeks its fulfillment there, but more on this next time…

But I wonder if there isn’t also an upside to depression, economically speaking?  Doesn’t this bring up some interesting points regarding our cultural beliefs, values, and focus?  What I hear from people regarding economic realities is the reality of fear—fear of losing ‘security,’ fear of losing ‘stability,’ fear of losing ‘safety,’ fear of losing ‘status,’ etc.  If we observe carefully, I think what sits underneath and all around our money is fear.  This observation is born out in the constant stream of news, prognosticators, bleary-eyed investment reps, ranting, raving, and anger in response to the ‘crisis’ we face.  For almost all of us, our money represents something larger—our ability to retire, our need to provide for our children, security, comfort, the means to achieve and exceed, and a whole host of other things.  This is precisely when we should know that money has become a problem, i.e. when it represents something larger that we must fear. 

This is why Jesus is so timely and relevant even today when, in a discussion on money, he says, “Fear not little children, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom (Luke 12.32).”  Jesus believes that it is a problem for us when we look to money to provide safety, security, stability, and status—at that point money has achieved a whole new status called “god.”  It might also be called idol or addiction because we are making money the ultimate determiner of our happiness or our satisfaction.  Jesus’ solution to monetary fear is to focus on the generosity of God who takes pleasure at sharing His Kingdom.

I believe the current recession is exposing this fear for many of us.  With household debt and government debt at an all time high and with the average household owing more than $9,000 in revolving credit card debt, fear of loss is mounting.  These facts betray that most of us live a consumeristic existence.  We are driven to buy and consume more because we always feel that we need and must have more.  The power we achieve by swiping that card to purchase the latest and best is an intangible asset to our status; the pleasure we feel by checking our retirement accounts belies the true place of our security; the pulsations we have when we determine that we have “made it” prove the position of our satisfaction. 

My hope for this recession is that it will expose for us the facades of safety, security, and status—they don’t really exist and they never really did, even when the stock market was at 14,000 and unemployment at 4%--the present crisis proves the impermanence of such ‘gods.’  They cannot satisfy and they will not last.  They will continue to demand everything from us and give us smaller and smaller paybacks in return.  As the recession exposes our fear and the facades around which we build our lives are broken down, I hope that we will entertain the Jesus who gave up security, stability, and status to join the human race and give His life away (Phil. 2.1-11) because he, the most satisfied man in the world, wanted you to dream bigger dreams and live a bigger life than that lived for long term stability or the idea of retiring to beach and golf, or the notion of a successful business.  What he offers is a risky, adventurous, life-shattering, dream-altering, journey to redeem and renew the entire universe which he rules.  Will we join in?  If we did, I believe there really would be an up side to this recession.

But I wonder if there isn’t also an upside to depression, economically speaking?  Doesn’t this bring up some interesting points regarding our cultural beliefs, values, and focus?  What I hear from people regarding economic realities is the reality of fear—fear of losing ‘security,’ fear of losing ‘stability,’ fear of losing ‘safety,’ fear of losing ‘status,’ etc.  If we observe carefully, I think what sits underneath and all around our money is fear.  This observation is born out in the constant stream of news, prognosticators, bleary-eyed investment reps, ranting, raving, and anger in response to the ‘crisis’ we face.  For almost all of us, our money represents something larger—our ability to retire, our need to provide for our children, security, comfort, the means to achieve and exceed, and a whole host of other things.  This is precisely when we should know that money has become a problem, i.e. when it represents something larger that we must fear. 

This is why Jesus is so timely and relevant even today when, in a discussion on money, he says, “Fear not little children, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom (Luke 12.32).”  Jesus believes that it is a problem for us when we look to money to provide safety, security, stability, and status—at that point money has achieved a whole new status called “god.”  It might also be called idol or addiction because we are making money the ultimate determiner of our happiness or our satisfaction.  Jesus’ solution to monetary fear is to focus on the generosity of God who takes pleasure at sharing His Kingdom.

I believe the current recession is exposing this fear for many of us.  With household debt and government debt at an all time high and with the average household owing more than $9,000 in revolving credit card debt, fear of loss is mounting.  These facts betray that most of us live a consumeristic existence.  We are driven to buy and consume more because we always feel that we need and must have more.  The power we achieve by swiping that card to purchase the latest and best is an intangible asset to our status; the pleasure we feel by checking our retirement accounts belies the true place of our security; the pulsations we have when we determine that we have “made it” prove the position of our satisfaction. 

My hope for this recession is that it will expose for us the facades of safety, security, and status—they don’t really exist and they never really did, even when the stock market was at 14,000 and unemployment at 4%--the present crisis proves the impermanence of such ‘gods.’  They cannot satisfy and they will not last.  They will continue to demand everything from us and give us smaller and smaller paybacks in return.  As the recession exposes our fear and the facades around which we build our lives are broken down, I hope that we will entertain the Jesus who gave up security, stability, and status to join the human race and give His life away (Phil. 2.1-11) because he, the most satisfied man in the world, wanted you to dream bigger dreams and live a bigger life than that lived for long term stability or the idea of retiring to beach and golf, or the notion of a successful business.  What he offers is a risky, adventurous, life-shattering, dream-altering, journey to redeem and renew the entire universe which he rules.  Will we join in?  If we did, I believe there really would be an up side to this recession.

November 6, 2008

To: My Fellow Followers of “That Way”

From: Rufus Smith, Pastor, City of Refuge Church (Houston, TX)

As Chairman of the EPC’s Urban Ministry Network and the only black senior pastor in the Central South, may I ask you to consider pausing this Sunday or next to openly recognize the historic American election this past Tuesday? The question is not whether you or I voted for President-Elect Obama or not, but the issue is the potential capacity of his election to expedite the erasing of the stain, stigma and stereotype in the collective soul and psyche of an indigenous ethnic group and a nation.

Whether you agree with the election results or not, on Tuesday, something happened in the minds and hearts of a significant percentage of African-Americans in your cities, towns and churches. For many whom we are trying to evangelize and disciple, please acknowledge in some way this political seismic shift, atmospheric, meteorite and divinely permitted event (Ps. 75:1-6); to ignore it with silence or inaction would be a setback and a squandered bridge building opportunity. Make a phone call, send a note, visit the office, issue a statement or whatever else the Lord may lead you to do to some African-American pastor or leader in your community.

As a Christian, I am NOT personally distracted from the first task of Glory to God via worship and making disciples of every ethnicity; for I deeply believe that our hope is salvation in Jesus not legislation through jurisprudence. As an American, I am prayerful for my President Elect and push for his success (I Tim. 2:1-5 as I did for President George W. Bush); As a Black American, I am as proud as a prancing horse. 

I was very somber Wednesday. Quite unusual for me. It seemed surreal. Time stood still as I savored what had just happened in my beloved country. 388 long years after the arrival of the Mayflower, the glass ceiling and, I believe, a national curse had been broken.

My 18year old daughter Rhoda called me at 10:45am on Wednesday in tears.  “Dad, she said, you won’t believe the stuff I am seeing and hearing…Please come get me”. I warned her on our drive to school this morning of the backlash some would have today. Several of her classmates are dressed in black today to commemorate the destruction of our country and have hurled insults at her. She has been their classmate for

12 years at this highly esteemed Christian school. My wife Jacqueline went to share an off campus lunch with her, then take her back to school where she belongs to continue her maturation process. I don’t fully blame the kids, but their behavior is indicative of the work we still need to do in our society, even among Christians.

We as elders know that the ultimate issue is sin not skin.  I don’t expect those who are not black Americans to share the SAME EUPHORIC INTENSITY of this HISTORIC DAY as I do. They can’t. At stake is how this atmosphere can be a time of bountiful harvest for the LifeGiver King and how it can hasten the probability that inner city churches and multi-racial churches like City of Refuge can become commonplace in our children’s lifetime.

I trust that a sacred and civil dialogue can begin for some and continue for others.  This time can be a Kingdom building opening for those of us who name the name of Christ and are Christians first, Americans second, and African-Euro-Asian-Latino, Native Americans third.

Rev. Rufus Smith

Voting is like marrying and crying and laughing and buying. We should do it, but only as if we were not doing it. That's because "the present form of this world is passing away" and, in God's eyes, "the time has grown very short." Here's the way Paul puts it:

The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. (1 Corinthians 7:29-31)

Let's take these one at a time and compare them to voting.

1. "Let those who have wives live as though they had none."

This doesn't mean move out of the house, don't have sex, and don't call her Honey. Earlier in this chapter Paul says, "The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights" (1 Corinthians 7:3). He also says to love her the way Christ loved the church, leading and providing and protecting (Ephesians 5:25-30). It means this: Marriage is momentary. It's over at death, and there is no marriage in the resurrection. Wives and husbands are second priorities, not first. Christ is first. Marriage is for making much of him.

It means: If she is exquisitely desirable, beware of desiring her more than Christ. And if she is deeply disappointing, beware of being hurt too much. This is temporary-only a brief lifetime. Then comes the never-disappointing life which is life indeed.

So it is with voting. We should do it. But only as if we were not doing it. Its outcomes do not give us the greatest joy when they go our way, and they do not demoralize us when they don't. Political life is for making much of Christ whether the world falls apart or holds together.

2. "Let those who mourn [do so] as though they were not mourning."

Christians mourn with real, deep, painful mourning, especially over losses-loss of those we love, loss of health, loss of a dream. These losses hurt. We cry when we are hurt. But we cry as though not crying. We mourn knowing we have not lost something so valuable we cannot rejoice in our mourning. Our losses do not incapacitate us. They do not blind us to the possibility of a fruitful future serving Christ. The Lord gives and takes away. But he remains blessed. And we remain hopeful in our mourning.

So it is with voting. There are losses. We mourn. But not as those who have no hope. We vote and we lose, or we vote and we win. In either case, we win or lose as if we were not winning or losing. Our expectations and frustrations are modest. The best this world can offer is short and small. The worst it can offer has been predicted in the book of Revelation. And no vote will hold it back. In the short run, Christians lose (Revelation 13:7). In the long run, we win (21:4).

3. "Let those who rejoice [do so] as though they were not rejoicing."

Christians rejoice in health (James 5:13) and in sickness (James 1:2). There are a thousand good and perfect things that come down from God that call forth the feeling of happiness. Beautiful weather. Good friends who want to spend time with us. Delicious food and someone to share it with. A successful plan. A person helped by our efforts.

But none of these good and beautiful things can satisfy our soul. Even the best cannot replace what we were made for, namely, the full experience of the risen Christ (John 17:24). Even fellowship with him here is not the final and best gift. There is more of him to have after we die (Philippians 1:21-23)-and even more after the resurrection. The best experiences here are foretastes. The best sights of glory are through a mirror dimly. The joy that rises from these previews does not and should not rise to the level of the hope of glory. These pleasures will one day be as though they were not. So we rejoice remembering this joy is a foretaste, and will be replaced by a vastly better joy.

So it is with voting. There are joys. The very act of voting is a joyful statement that we are not under a tyrant. And there may be happy victories. But the best government we get is a foreshadowing. Peace and justice are approximated now. They will be perfect when Christ comes. So our joy is modest. Our triumphs are short-lived-and shot through with imperfection. So we vote as though not voting.

4. "Let those who buy [do so] as though they had no goods."

Let Christians keep on buying while this age lasts. Christianity is not withdrawal from business. We are involved, but as though not involved. Business simply does not have the weight in our hearts that it has for many. All our getting and all our having in this world is getting and having things that are not ultimately important. Our car, our house, our books, our computers, our heirlooms-we possess them with a loose grip. If they are taken away, we say that in a sense we did not have them. We are not here to possess. We are here to lay up treasures in heaven.

This world matters. But it is not ultimate. It is the stage for living in such a way to show that this world is not our God, but that Christ is our God. It is the stage for using the world to show that Christ is more precious than the world.

So it is with voting. We do not withdraw. We are involved-but as if not involved. Politics does not have ultimate weight for us. It is one more stage for acting out the truth that Christ, and not politics, is supreme.

5. "Let those who deal with the world [do so] as though they had no dealings with it."

Christians should deal with the world. This world is here to be used. Dealt with. There is no avoiding it. Not to deal with it is to deal with it that way. Not to weed your garden is to cultivate a weedy garden. Not to wear a coat in Minnesota is to freeze-to deal with the cold that way. Not to stop when the light is red is to spend your money on fines or hospital bills and deal with the world that way. We must deal with the world.

But as we deal with it, we don't give it our fullest attention. We don't ascribe to the world the greatest status. There are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. We use the world without offering it our whole soul. We may work with all our might when dealing with the world, but the full passions of our heart will be attached to something higher-Godward purposes. We use the world, but not as an end in itself. It is a means. We deal with the world in order to make much of Christ.

So it is with voting. We deal with the system. We deal with the news. We deal with the candidates. We deal with the issues. But we deal with it all as if not dealing with it. It does not have our fullest attention. It is not the great thing in our lives. Christ is. And Christ will be ruling over his people with perfect supremacy no matter who is elected and no matter what government stands or falls. So we vote as though not voting.

By all means vote. But remember: "The world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever" (1 John 2:17).

Voting with you, as though not voting,

Pastor John

By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org

Her proposal goes like this:  “I think the U.S. government should come in and offer a 25% amnesty to every homeowner in America.  Just across the board, have the government cut off 25% of all outstanding mortgage balances; this is the amnesty the American people need.”  In other words, if you have a loan for $200,000, then the government will knock $50,000 off the top and pick up your tab.  Now, I have no interest in debating the merits or demerits of such a proposal; I only want to look at how this proposal views our government. 

When Whoopi said this, I almost broke the exercise machine.  My thought was, “who the heck do you think the government is?”  She talks as if the government is this personal, all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful entity who can simply wave the magic wand of ‘amnesty’ over our mortgages and make all the pain go away.  Again, it doesn’t matter whether you like the policy or not, I’m not concerned with that right now.  What matters is having a Savior-like, knight on a white horse view of our government.  As Martin Luther told the Pope in 1517, if you have the power to forgive sins, then why would you not empty purgatory and hell completely?  And if the government has the kind of power to grant ‘amnesty’ then why not just knock off the entire credit balance and then all the student loan balances, and then all the car loans, and definitely don’t forget the credit card bills!  In fact, let’s just have a system where the government gives us every luxury and we never have to work or pay for anything!  You’re probably thinking that now I’m just being silly.  You’d be right but we also all need to notice that the government possesses no magical wand, nor is ‘amnesty’ free.  If the government did follow this advice, then it would cost them money too, money that would have to come from somewhere.  It does not simply happen because the government says so.  The money would have to be either printed (in which case inflation would drastically increase, basically a tax hike in the form of inflation), borrowed (from another country, bank, or independent investors in which case someone has to eventually pay it back with interest), taxed (from the paychecks of citizens which seems counterproductive since you’re trying to give them money) or found (in the form of across the board spending cuts in other programs). 

Whether or not you think these are appropriate measures for our government to take, it is not appropriate to view the government as the all-powerful Savior who can simply offer us amnesty if it so chooses with no other repercussions.  No, only the real God can do that, and all this turmoil and panic has made me wonder where our trust really is right now?  Fortunately the real God has done that, but it wasn’t free for Him either; it cost him the death of His Son on a Roman cross.  A God who has paid so dearly is the only God we can trust in times of crisis.  “He who did not spare His own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8.32)”  Who are you trusting right now?

In the previous few posts, I’ve tried to show why the only way to explain the facts is by resurrection, making the reality and fact of this amazing event almost beyond a historical doubt.  If this is true then you is now a ‘self-involving’ belief.  You cannot simply say, yes Jesus rose from the dead but that means nothing to me personally.  No, if Jesus rose, the world is different; He is Lord and Ruler of all things.  If Jesus rose, He was vindicated and approved in all His actions and teachings.  If Jesus rose, the ‘myth’ of Christianity is a true myth.  If Jesus, rose, He did so in victory over sin, death, and hell, and provided a payment for the sins of His people.  If Jesus rose, He now stands before us wrapped with all authority, power, and majesty, and demands our repentance, our worship, our lives, and our all.  Anything less would be sheer treason. 

Tim Keller:  “Each year at Easter I get to preach on the Resurrection. In my sermon I always say to my skeptical, secular friends that, even if they can’t believe in the resurrection, they should want it to be true.  Most of them care deeply about justice for the poor, alleviating hunger and disease, and caring for the environment.  Yet many of them believe that the material world was caused by accident and that the world and everything in it will eventually simply burn up in the death of the sun.  They find it discouraging that so few people care about justice without realizing that their own worldview undermines any motivation to make the world a better place.  Why sacrifice for the needs of others if in the end nothing we do will make any difference?  If the resurrection of Jesus happened, however, that means there’s infinite hope and reason to pour ourselves out for the needs of the world.” 

The Final Move—If the tomb was empty and if Jesus appeared to His disciples (conclusions which are nearly irrefutable), then by far the best way to explain them, along with the rise of Christianity, is by Resurrection.  The best and really only good explanation is that Jesus really was raised from the dead, and the disciples really did meet Him.  To quote Wright again: 

“The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the ‘meetings or ‘sightings’ of the risen Jesus in order to explain a faith they already had.  Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion-experience would have generated such ideas; nobody would have invented it, no matter how guilty or how forgiven they felt, no matter how many hours they poured over the Scriptures.  To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and to enter into a fantasy world of our own.”

I believe that from what I have argued so far, the historicity of the resurrection is beyond dispute.  This leaves us one final question which I will take up next week—“So what?”  What if it is true?  Why should that matter at all to me or anyone else?  I believe this is very personal so look for the next entry coming next Tuesday.

We’ve discussed why alternate theories of resurrection don’t work, now I want to offer positive proof that the resurrection literally and physically occurred.  I’ll let you consider this evidence and then next time try to draw some conclusions.  I’d love to hear any thoughts you have by email.

[1]  I will follow the argument of N.T. Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, and his appendix in Tony Flew’s book, There is a God.

First, the disciples’ claim would have been easily disproved at the time, had it been false. All that would have needed to be done to silence them would have been to produce Jesus’ body. This, though, was not done.  Paul called out over 500 hundred witnesses (I Cor. 15.6) with whom the sightings could have been verified or denied.  There is no reason to call such a vast number of witnesses unless they really could testify affirmatively.

Second, it is again difficult to account for the testimony of those who had not followed Jesus prior to the resurrection on this theory. Why would those who rejected Jesus when he was alive buy into Christianity when he was dead?  Many, like James (Jesus’ brother), rejected Jesus as the Messiah until after His death, which cannot be explained without something extraordinary occurring.  There were many, crucified or defeated “Messiahs” in Jesus’ day; His death would have simply been another reason not to believe that He was the true Messiah.  Therefore, something substantive must have happened after his death to make so many people change their view of Jesus.  Simply telling a lie about the situation would not have reversed the basic beliefs of the hearers. 

Third, the disciples’ commitment to the cause counts strongly against the idea that their claims were made up. Jesus’ followers faced great persecution for their claims about Jesus, yet, after his death, not one of them retracted those claims. People do sometimes invent lies, and people do sometimes die for lies, I cannot think of a single instance where multiple people, independent of one another, would die for a lie they invented.  Before Jesus’ death this was not the case; Peter famously denied Jesus three times. Something transformed the early Christians into fervent witnesses to the resurrection. What could have done that other than a genuine resurrection?[1]

Fourth, as we will soon see, there was no basis for the disciples to make up the kind of story that now exists.  They did not construct if from the Old Testament text, the O.T. idea of resurrection, or the current cultural milieu in which they lived.  Thus, if they made it up, they did so in the most imaginary and least believable way.  There are several other theories, but I’ll deal with each of them as I present the positive arguments for the actual historical occurrence of Jesus’ resurrection.

One attempt to explain this data, sometimes called the "swoon theory," denies Jesus’ death. On this theory, Jesus didn’t really die at all. Yes, he was crucified—that much is undeniable—but he survived the crucifixion. When he was laid in the tomb he was unconscious, but alive. He then resuscitated, escaped from the tomb, and appeared to the disciples, who mistakenly thought he had been resurrected. This theory thus neatly explains the resurrection appearances without having, implausibly, to deny the crucifixion.  Christians dismiss the swoon theory for a number of reasons.

First, people didn’t survive crucifixion. Crucifixion was a brutal form of execution, one well-practiced by the Romans. The Romans knew what they were doing; Jesus could not have made it through the crucifixion alive.  Second, even if he had made it through the crucifixion alive, Jesus would not have been in a fit state to escape from the tomb. The tomb in which he was laid, according to the Bible, was enclosed by a large boulder, and guarded by Roman soldiers. Even if he had survived crucifixion, Jesus, having been beaten, stabbed, scourged, crucified, and starved, would have been too weak to move the boulder, and wouldn’t have got past the guards.  Third, we have to believe that Jesus, after having done so much good for others, now begins to lie to his closest friends.  Fourth, even if Jesus had survived the crucifixion and escaped from the tomb, there’s no way that he would have been mistaken as someone resurrected.  The rigors of crucifixion would have left him in an appalling state, yet Jesus’ appearance before his disciples was such that they thought he was in a glorified, resurrection body.  He moved around, cooked fish, traveled, taught, walked many miles, etc.  Therefore the swoon theory cannot seriously be maintained.[1]

We’ll take on a few more theories before I try to show positively and historically that resurrection is the best and only way to explain the historical facts as we have them.

[1] Adapted from www.existence-of-god.com

Modern people often look at the miracles in the Bible, especially the Resurrection, and laugh at how superstitious people were to believe such things.  While people of yesterday supposedly attributed anything out of the ordinary to ‘God’s work,’ modern people today believe that science (which has shown that nature operates by ‘fixed’ laws) has proven that miracles cannot and do not occur, and so laughter and scorn is poured on the Biblical narratives on this basis.  However, C.S. Lewis, in his essay on miracles (can be found as essay #2 in God in the Dock, and in my opinion is the best 12 pages you could read on the nature of miracles) has an important quote that will instantly cure us of our ‘chronological snobbery:’[1] 

“There is one thing often said about our ancestors which we must not say.  We must not say ‘They believed in miracles because they did not know the Laws of Nature.’  This is nonsense.  When St. Joseph discovered that his bride was pregnant, he was ‘minded to put her away.’  He knew enough biology for that.  Otherwise, of course he would not have regarded pregnancy as a proof of infidelity.  When he accepted the Christian explanation, he regarded it as a miracle precisely because he knew enough of the Laws of Nature to know that this was a suspension of them.  When the disciples saw Christ walking on water, they were frightened:  they would not have been frightened unless they had known the laws of Nature and known that this was an exception.  Complete ignorance of the laws of Nature would preclude the perception of the miraculous just as rigidly as complete disbelief in the supernatural precludes it, perhaps even more so.  For, while the materialist would have at least to explain miracles away, the man wholly ignorant of Nature would simply not notice them.”

Lewis’ point is well-taken.  The Biblical stories are just as in awe over what happened to Jesus as we would be if we saw the same events today.  When the disciples hear about the resurrection, they do not sigh in relief as if what they expected to happen actually came to pass; rather, they doubt and must be convinced by sound proof that anything like this could have actually happened.  Mark 16.11 says that when the disciples were told Jesus was alive, “they would not believe it.”  In Matthew 28.17 we hear that “some doubted.”  In Luke 24.11 the words about resurrection seem to the apostles as “an idle tale and they did not believe.”  In John 20.25, Thomas says he will not believe unless he can touch Jesus’ hands, feet, and side.  Yet despite their initial disbelief, they all witness the risen Jesus, come to believe in Him, make the resurrection the centerpiece of their theology/preaching, and give their lives to that truth, all radical reversals. 

Therefore, any rival theory of the Resurrection must be able to explain 1) How the unique doctrine of the Resurrection arose among Christians, 2) Why the stories are the way they are, 3) Why the Resurrection took center stage 4) Why the disciples literally died for this belief; 5) How the muddled, frightened disciples with their Messiah defeated became the bold proclaimers of faith in Christ and literally conquered the Roman Empire.  Next time, we’ll ask if any other explanation can explain these agreed upon facts.

[1]  Chronological snobbery refers to the modern man’s assumption that his current historical and cultural era are determinative across history as the ‘right way’ to look at things.

I’ve been arguing all along from a variety of phenomena that belief in God is a much more tenable position than that of atheism.  We spoke about how many things in our world have non-utilitarian value as it relates to the driving force of evolution—survival, things like music, art, beauty, love, and morality.  But isn’t there a better explanation than, ‘God?’  Of course, when it comes to such non-utilitarian value like religion, art, and beauty, evolutionists argue that these are simply the results of hard-wired brain chemistry, traits which helped our ancestors be less selfish and work together more often, leading to higher tribal survival rates.  However, I don’t think this position is tenable.

It seems evident to me that Darwinism oversteps its boundaries here by claiming to know too much.  Dawkins himself admits that since we are the product of natural selection, we can’t completely trust our own senses because evolution is interested only in preserving adaptive behavior, not true belief.  Thus evolution can only be trusted to give us cognitive faculties that help us live on, not to provide ones that give us an accurate and true picture of the world around us.  Patricia Churchland says this, “The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive.  Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing the world is advantageous so long as it…enhances the organism’s chances for survival.  Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.”  Even Darwin was plagued by this issue.  To a friend he confided, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” 

So, if there is no God, just the blind forces of natural selection, then it’s not only our beliefs about God we can’t trust, it’s our beliefs about everything, including evolutionary science.  In this system we would simply have no reason to trust what any of our faculties tell us for fear that they may simply be hard-wired neurochemistry that evolved there to help us survive.  If what my brain tells me about God is just chemical reactions then the same applies to what their brain tells them about the world.  Alvin Plantinga provides a scathing critique:  “People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion…the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God…It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.” 

The best way to explain the kind of universe we have (and the belief that we can know something true about it) is by belief in a personal creator God who imbues us with a mind where we can reasonably trust our faculties and also assume that there are realities corresponding to our desires.  If we did not believe in God, we would expect NONE of these things to be the case.  In addition, consider that every person on planet earth has a moral framework or orientation.  (As proof, consider:  Isn’t there some person, somewhere in the world who is doing something that you disagree with?)  Evolution cannot explain this human phenomenon because it would be purely anti-survival to put great care and self-sacrifice into the welfare of others.  Dawkins himself admits the problem, “[To be nice] is a misfiring, even a perversion of the Darwinian take.  Human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection.  Well, if that’s a perversion, it’s the kind of perversion we need to encourage and spread.”  Notice at the end, that Dawkins leaps to an ethical claim of what we “need to encourage and spread.”  This is a bald-faced faith claim, and there’s no way around it.  Augustine said we must believe something in order to know anything.  Thus, no matter what we do, we simply cannot extricate ourselves from a world in which we MUST make and live by faith. It’s almost as if the world were ‘designed’ that way!

If you buy any parts of my arguments so far, then you may get to this point and say, ok, maybe there is a God but so what?  What does that really mean to me?  If that’s you, then you’ll want to follow on to the next topic as I address Jesus, specifically as I attempt to historically PROVE that he rose from the dead.  If that is true, we move onto wholly new ground with very personal implications.[1]

[1]  Many of the thoughts of this entry have been taken or adapted from Tim Keller, The Reason for God.

Whenever we read of the power of evolution, it is described as a sleek, streamlining force that focuses all living beings on utility, efficiency, and most of all, reproduction.  Why then, we might ask, is there so much about our existence that seems non-utilitarian?  Why does it seem that there is much to our lives that leads inexorably to non-utility, inefficiency, and difficulties with reproduction?  Why are there things like beauty, art, romance, love, relationships, fine dining, music, poetry?  Why are we awe struck before some great painting or before some great person or before some great piece of music?  Why do we love love? 

None of these things serve the purpose of evolution and in fact work against it.  Tim Keller, quoting Bertrand Russell, writes, “If there is no God, and everything in this world is the product of ‘an accidental collocation of atoms,’ then there is no actual purpose for which we were made—we are accidents.  If we are the product of accidental natural forces, then what we call ‘beauty’ is nothing but a neurological hardwired response to particular data.  You only find certain scenery to be beautiful because you had ancestors who knew you would find food there and they survived because of that feature, and now we have it too.  In the same way, though music feels significant, that significance is an illusion.  Love too must be seen in this light.  If we are the result of blind natural forces, then what we call ‘love’ is simply a biochemical response, inherited from ancestors who survived because this trait helped them survive.”  Yet we cannot escape the fact that we are awe-struck before art, beauty, music, and love—we long for it and we gain meaning and fulfillment when we find it.  Furthermore, we not only feel the reality of those things, we feel pain when they are absent.  C.S. Lewis brings this point into stark reality:

You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes.  You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.

We may respond, “Just because you feel like you need something doesn’t make it true.  Just because I feel the desire for a steak dinner, doesn’t mean I will get it.”  You may not get that particular meal but your hunger betrays the fact that there is something called food which corresponds to that hunger.  St. Augustine found these to be clues to the reality of God.  He argued that for every innate desire we have, there is a corresponding reality (sexual desire to sex, physical appetite to food, tiredness to sleep, relational desires to friendship).  We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, or friendship, can fulfill.  Keller writes,

“We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, friendship, or success can satisfy.  We want something nothing in this world can fulfill.  Isn’t that at least a clue that this ‘something’ that we want exists?  This unfulfillable longing, then, qualifies as a deep, innate human desire, and that makes it a major clue that God is there.”   

[1] For the relevant sections, see Tim Keller, The Reason for God, 133-135

Converted atheist Antony Flew writes, “We are conscious and conscious that we are conscious.  No one can deny this without self-contradiction.”  Although ‘consciousness’ is associated with certain regions of the brain, when the same systems of neurons are present in the brain stem there is no ‘production’ of consciousness.  As physicist Gerald Schroeder points out, there is no essential difference in the ultimate physical constituents of a heap of sand and the brain of an Einstein.  Flew concludes, “Only blind and baseless faith in matter lies behind the claim that certain bits of matter can suddenly ‘create’ a new reality that bears no resemblance to matter.”  Self-awareness is a nearly impossible threshold to cross under the auspices of natural selection, for how could the impersonal forces of trait selection lead to an evolution of consciousness and self-awareness?  How could the impersonal lead to personality and the recognition of personal awareness?  Even the most vociferous atheists, Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins, after laying out the problem thoughtfully (even if reluctantly) admit they just don’t know.  To quote Dawkins, it “Beats the heck out of me.”  Steve Pinker writes, “The existence of subjective first-person experience is not explainable by science.” 

Maybe it’s not intended to be explained by science?  It seems to me that personal beings (such as us) are much more likely to be the result (or creation!) of a personal God who creates people in His image than the result of impersonal forces that blindly direct toward reproduction alone.  Actually, it’s hard to see how self-consciousness could be produced by evolution since evolution’s only goal is reproduction.  Self-consciousness would be a hindrance to reproduction rather than a help because it creates a need in humans for relationship.  This means that we rarely have reproduction without relationship.  Thus, for reproduction to take place, it requires a tangled web of emotional involvement as a precursor to a sexual relationship.  Of course there is casual sex but almost none of it is intended for procreation (though some inevitably leads there).  The point is that other animals are free to have sex without entangling emotional attachments, making it hard to see how evolution created something outside itself that would actually inhibit it’s only goal—reproduction!

When Darwin developed the theory of natural selection in the mid 1800’s, the face of science was much different.  In the absence of powerful microscopes, Darwin believed the cell to be nothing more than protoplasm, a mere bubble of jelly.  Today scientists cannot even talk of the cell without using terms that refer to building and engineering.  Francis Crick, co-founder of DNA, writes, “The cell is thus a minute factory, bustling with rapid, organized chemical activity.  Nature invented the assembly line some billions of years before Henry Ford.”  The problem this presents for the theory of evolution as an all consuming theory is that even these single cells are far too complex to be produced by gradual, single trait, natural selection.  No single part of the cell would give any survival power to a cell; rather, each part would all have to be present in order to function properly.  Thus, natural selection could not simply select each trait individually.  Michael Behe uses the example of a tiny string like flagellum which is attached like a tail to some bacteria.  It is a microscopic outboard rotary motor that comes equipped with a hook, joint, drive shaft, O-rings, a stator, and a bi-directional acid-powered motor that can do 100,000 RPMs.  In addition, even the simplest living cell is one of the most complicated structures on earth, containing within it more information than multiple sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  From this information Dinesh D’Souza comments, “It is crucially important to realize that this basic template of life, with all its intricate machinery of RNA and DNA, came fully formed with the first appearance of life.  D’Souza’s concludes, “Is it even reasonable to speculate that random combinations of atoms could have produced so marvelously complex and functional a thing as a living cell?”  Yet Richard Dawkins writes, “However improbably the origin of life might be, it must have happened this way because we are here.”  D’Souza’s response is scathing:  “It takes a lot of faith to believe things like this.” 

If believing that a fully functioning cell arrived on the scene independent of God or any creation event takes tremendous faith, it takes even more faith to believe that the first cell formed came imbedded with the instructions and the design to reproduce.  Even if we believe that a complex unicellular organism could have somehow “appeared” on the scene randomly, how could we believe that the newly formed cell came with the “goal” of reproduction?  It is much more likely that the cell would have appeared on the scene and then faded away with no way to pass on its genes.  Yet atheists like Dawkins and Dennet require us to believe that all living organisms have one innate goal—reproduction.  Where did organisms get such a ‘goal?’  How did they know that this was their chief responsibility in life?  Why did they need a purpose?  Somehow we are to believe that complex, encyclopedic organisms magically appeared on earth with innate goals for life and ‘desires’ to asexually reproduce.  Lastly, if we follow the fundamentalists that far, then we also have to create a way that natural selection could have moved us from asexual reproduction, a very simple way to pass on genes to bisexual reproduction, a more complicated way to pass on genes because it requires much more time and the tiresome task of finding an agreeable partner! 

Now the atheists will respond that my arguments are killing scientific inquiry because I can’t “imagine how such a thing could happen.”  This could not be further from the truth and in fact misses the whole point.  The point is to again ask the question of what has the greatest consistency of evidence.  Natural selection, though a great theory that explains much about the life on our planet, simply fails as an overall explanation for the beginning of life and for the complexity which we see.  It takes much less faith to believe that we have a God who is creative, complex, and orderly who imbedded these things into His world.

To make this logic clearer, Nancy Pearcy proposes to imagine that you found a huge universe creating machine, with hundreds of dials, each having trillions of settings representing these forces.  Imagine that what you discover is that each of these dials just happens to be set to exactly the right value for life to exist when even the slightest tweak of one knob would produce a lifeless universe.  Since the ‘knobs’ are not constrained by any natural law, they have all the earmarks of being a product of design or intention.  It is this exact basis which led Nobel Prize winner Arno Penzias to say, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”  Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson notes, “It almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”  Not to be outdone, Stephen Hawking concludes, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”  Robin Collins adds the illustration of hiking in the mountains and finding a group of rocks arranged in a formation that clearly formed the pattern, “Welcome to the mountains Robin Collins.”  One way to explain the formation would be to conclude that the rocks simply fell into that particular pattern by chance.  Suppose the only other viable hypothesis was that my brother, who was in the mountains before me, arranged the rocks in this way.  99.9% of us would go with the brother hypothesis.  Moreover, the best atheistic response to the fine tuning argument, or ‘anthropic principle,’ is posited by Richard Dawkins who argues that there may be trillions of universes, and given the enormous number of universes existing over enormous amounts of time and space, it is inevitable that one or a few of them are fine-tuned to sustain our kind of life.  Thus, the argument is rationally avoidable but not, in my opinion, reasonably avoidable.  Alvin Plantinga says that this line of reasoning is akin to dealing oneself 20 straight hands of four aces in the same game of poker.  As his companions reach for their guns, the poker player says, “I know it looks suspicious!  But what if there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of poker hands, there is one universe in which this possibility is realized?”  We just happen to find ourselves in the one where I deal myself 20 straight hands of four aces w/o cheating.”  To push this bit of science even further, consider the regularity of nature in the same light.  All scientific and inductive reasoning is based on the assumption that all the forces in the universe will remain constant.  Water will freeze under the same conditions, an object will fall at the same speed, the earth will continue to rotate, etc.  Bertrand Russell was troubled by the fact that we don’t know why nature is so regular now and we have no justification for believing it will behave that way tomorrow. Thus, science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature; it must take it on faith.  But it is precisely this confidence in a God who created a continuing orderly universe that gave rise to modern science! 

As one example of this and as an expansion the last entry, evolution cannot explain the beginning of life.  Darwin didn’t attempt to explain the origin of life, only the complex progression of life from the first species.  We now know that the simplest bacterial cell contains more information than the entire Encyclopedia Britanica, and it contains complicated, multi-faceted, and highly-organized machinery that all works together as a single unit of life.  Within the cell is a complex digital code called DNA which programs the cells actions and tells it how to function and when to reproduce.  Such was the nature of DNA that Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project, called it “The Language of God.”  This means that the cell itself, which would have existed before the process of evolution began (there must be life to select traits for survival), contains the clear mark of design.  For over 100 years now, atheistic Scientists have endeavored to create experiments showing how the first life form might have ‘appeared’ on the scene, but none have been successful, leading biologist Franklin Harold to confess that the origin of life is one of the “unsolved mysteries of science.”  Physicist Stephen Barr brilliantly notes Dawkins’ error in reasoning: 

When examined carefully, scientific accounts of natural processes are never really about order emerging from mere chaos, or form emerging from mere formlessness.  On the contrary, they are always about the unfolding or an order that was already implicit in the nature of things, although often in a secret or hidden way.  When we see situations that appear haphazard, or things that appear amorphous, automatically or spontaneously ‘arranging themselves’ into orderly patterns, what we find in every case is that what appeared to be haphazard actually had a great deal of order built into it…What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley’s watches.  Paley finds a watch and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance.  Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point.  But that is absurd.  How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of an explanation than the watches themselves?  (Italics mine)

“It should be clear from all this that the problem is not with evolution.  The problem is with Darwinism.  Evolution is a scientific theory; Darwinism is a metaphysical stance and a political ideology…the atheist spin on evolution”[2]  Thus, we again find more powerful evidence in science and reason to believe that God exists. 

[1]  Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, 147.

[2]  Ibid, 152.

In the 1950s, a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and declared that he had not found God.  C.S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the castle attic looking for Shakespeare.  If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods.  He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play.  We might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play.  Therefore, in no case could we ‘prove’ God’s existence as if he were an object wholly within our universe like oxygen and hydrogen.  Rather, as C.S. Lewis also notes, “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”  Thus, we don’t learn about the sun by staring into it but by looking at the world it reveals and sustains.[1]

With this in view, let me just state this first reason as a question—Why is there something rather than nothing?  Carl Sagan famously said, “The Cosmos is all there ever is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.”  Besides being a revealing wordplay on the Gloria Patri, it is also a bad explanation of the facts.  Consider the words of scientist Francis Collins:  “Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point.  That implies that before that, there was nothing.  I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself.  And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it.”  This was all discovered in the late 1920s when Edwin Hubble noticed that galaxies were moving rapidly away from each other, shattering the impression that many held regarding the stillness and changelessness of the universe.  Incredibly, space itself was expanding along with the universe.  Right away, scientists realized that these galaxies were moving apart, not due to any cosmic force, but because they were once flung apart by a primeval explosion.  Scientists projected a moment in which all the mass in the universe was compressed into a point of infinite density, the entire universe contained in a single atom.  From that infinitesimal point came an explosion, filling the universe with light and creating a temperature of 100 Trillion degrees Centigrade.  The fact that the universe was expanding solved the problem that had enamored scientists for years:  why the galaxies continued to stay apart from each other rather than being pulled together by the force of gravity. 

While it has often been noted that Christians so desire God to be real that they ignore any evidence to the contrary, it can also be argued that atheists often so wish God to be a myth that they refuse any evidence to the contrary.  For a couple of examples, consider the reactions of several scientists to the discovery of the Big Bang and expanding universe.  Astronomer Arthur Eddington called the concept “preposterous, incredible, repugnant.”  Physicist Philip Morrison of MIT confessed, “I find it hard to accept the big bang theory.  I would like to reject it.”  Allan Sandage of Carnegie Laboratories said the idea was “such a strange conclusion” that “it cannot really be true.”  Why would these scientists be so opposed to this brilliant scientific discovery?  If true, it would imply that there was a “moment of creation” when the universe and all its laws came into existence.  Before the Big Bang, there were no laws of physics so the “natural laws” cannot be used to explain the Big Bang itself; rather the Big Bang produced the physical laws we now know.  If the universe was produced outside the laws of physics, then its origin satisfies the basic definition of the word ‘miracle.’[2]

The Bible is unique in positing this miracle in such a way that science has now verified its veracity.  The Bible did not have to begin with a specific point-in-time creation event, but in fact it did, and it was unique to do so.  In Buddhism, “there are multiple world systems constantly coming into being and passing away.”  In addition, Hinduism and Buddhism describe endless cycles of time stretching into the indefinite past while the Bible presents time as finite.  The Greeks and Romans believed in the eternity of history.  In contrast Jews and Christians have always believed not only that God made the universe, but also that He made it out of nothing (literally speaking the universe into existence).  We experience time and space in such a way that they seemingly have no end, and in such a way that it is almost unimaginable that there was a time when time and matter did not exist.  In fact, nobody else (whether philosopher or worldview system or religion) ever did imagine it except for Judaism and Christianity.  But modern science has confirmed that the universe was indeed ‘created’ out of nothing.  In addition, the Big Bang theory resolves one seemingly glaring contradiction in Genesis, namely that light was created on the first day (Gen. 1.3) but the sun (which produces our light) was not created until the fourth day.  However, we now know that the Big Bang happened with a burst of light and energy, and that the sun came into existence later.  Arthur Eddington, who once chafed at the Big Bang eventually acknowledged it and reluctantly admitted, “the beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look at it as frankly supernatural.”  Astronomer Robert Jastrow puts it even more vividly, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.  He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; his is about to conquer the highest peak.  As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”[3]

The old argument stands:  “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.  The universe began to exist.  Therefore, the universe has a cause.”  Scientists can no longer deny that the universe has an beginning and now must resort to denying that existence must have a cause.  Next time we will look at the argument from design.

[1]  This paragraph closely mirrors Tim Keller’s Reason for God, 122.

[2]  Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity

[3]  Ibid.

Controversy has always swirled around the Bible, but for thousands of years one of the least controversial verses in the Bible was its great opening line, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Scripture begins with God, posits God, assumes God—His self-existence, His necessity, and His power to create the universe from nothing (ex nihilo).  In more recent times however, controversy around the concept of the existence of God and His creative powers has been the topic of intense debate and public provocation.  Since the highly publicized “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925, science and religion have seemed locked in a fearsome duel to the death over whether the world in which we exist is better explained by natural causes or by the God of the Bible.  In light of this “battle” many have asked for proof of God.  Maybe you’ve asked someone to prove God’s existence to you or maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of that question.  Either way, what it seems that many are demanding is an empirical, no way to escape, laboratory demonstration of God’s existence that not semi-reasonable person could deny.  This is exactly the kind of proof demanded today from extremely outspoken atheists like Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins argues that the claim of God’s existence is a scientific hypothesis that should be open to rational demonstration.  He and others want an airtight, empirical argument from God that convinces every person., but is this fair?  I don’t think it is.

What these skeptics are asking for is what has been termed ‘strong rationalism, meaning that no one should believe any proposition unless it can be proved rationally by loci or empirically by sense experience.  According to Tim Keller, proof, “in this view, is an argument so strong that no person whose logical faculties are operating properly would have any reason for disbelieving it.  However, ‘strong rationalism’ is impossible and cannot be defended.  It cannot abide by its own most foundational premise.  How could you empirically prove that no one should believe something without empirical proof?  Notice how W.K. Clifford’s statement betrays that belief, not science is at the core of strong rationalism:  “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient [empirical] evidence.”  This is a statement of ethics, belief, and faith, not a statement of science.  Thus, any call for ‘strong rationalism’ is by nature self-defeating.  This is why the books of the new atheism have not found kind quarters among even fellow atheist reviewers.  Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton wrote a scathing review of Dawkin’s God Delusion, attacking the naïve ideas that faith has no rational component, and that reason isn’t based on faith:

“Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christan and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly.  Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school taught that.  For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief…Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason.  We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.”

Historically, scientists did not always think this way.  In fact, you may be surprised to know that science once acted on core theistic beliefs, namely that this world was a product of God’s mind, that His personhood, replete with personality, thought, and love, were the basis for our trusting our basic senses and rationality, and that science was a way to investigate the mind of God.  Not surprisingly, these beliefs brought us what has been dubbed the “Scientific Revolution.”  Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, many others were Christians who brought their beliefs to bear on science. 

The best approach to take is what C.S. Reppert called “critical rationality.”  It assumes that there are arguments that many or most will find convincing but that in the end, there will always be some way to rationally avoid ANY conclusion.  On this basis, we can evaluate belief without requiring empirical, conclusive proof.  This is exactly how science works.  Even Dawkins admits that Darwinism cannot be finally proven, and that “new facts may come to light which will force our successors to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.”  But as Tim Keller writes, “that does not mean that science cannot test theories and find some far more empirically verified if it organizes the evidence and explains the phenomena better than any conceivable alternative theory.  In exactly the same way, we can test to see if there is a God.  In other words, as a hypothesis, does naturalism or belief in God best explain that we have a universe, that regular laws operate within it, that it contains human life with consciousness and moral sense, and that we are personal in nature?  That’s the question I’ll seek to answer on this blog for the next few weeks, but we must go forward on the basis of “critical rationalism,” not self-defeating “strong rationalism.” [1]

[1] This entry closely follows the thought laid out in Tim Keller’s book, The Reason for God.

Some of you, like this woman, have been the victims of religious hypocrisy before, you have seen the judgmentalism, arrogance, and pride in a church or in a Christian make you think, ‘if that’s Christianity, I want no part of it.’  What Jesus shows you here is that long before your experience and long before the criticisms of Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Frederic Neitchze, and Richard Dawkins, Jesus was condemning religious hypocrisy in much stronger terms.  Jesus says that religious people have no claim on Him, so if you’re a critic of religious hypocrisy then Jesus is with you.

Of course, now we see the real problem with Jesus.  It isn’t that Simon doesn’t have enough proof to believe, it isn’t the intellectual arguments against Jesus, it isn’t the issue of suffering and injustice, it’s the fact that Jesus is willing and daring enough to stand in the face of a righteous, self-sufficient, independent, highly knowledgeable Pharisee and say, You are no better than this prostitute and in fact worse, and you need Me.  Jesus is an affront to Simon's pride.  It is the same today, the biggest problem with Jesus isn’t the proof (there’s plenty of proof), it isn’t the scientific arguments, it isn’t the intellectual arguments, it isn’t the issue of suffering and injustice (none of those keep the woman from coming), it is that Jesus Christ is willing and daring enough to stare 21st century Americans like us who are good, respected, money-donating, religious, moral,

independent, self-sufficient people and say, ‘You need Me.’  The real problem with Jesus is that He addresses me and says, Jeremy, I have something to say to you.  The real problem with Jesus is that He is unrelentingly offensive, He never stops confronting us; He never stops exposing our slavery to self-righteousness.  The real problem with Jesus is that He says I will come in and affect every area of your life, just as He did for the prostitute.  See, Simon’s self-righteousness was a way to keep Jesus at bay, a line in the sand for Jesus.  But the prostitute saw that Jesus will rub out your line in the sand and step right over it; she saw that He was coming to affect her finances, her sexuality, her lifestyle, her career, her recreation, everything.  The real problem with Jesus is that He requires us to admit we are on the same level with that sinful woman; the real problem with Jesus is that He says you can’t do it, I must do it for you.  The real problem with Jesus is that He doesn’t operate on quid pro quo basis.  He gives you everything for nothing, and you fall at His feet and worship.  Dan Allender said this, “The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is nothing—and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.” 

Let me try to illustrate this with what I believe is a Biblical illustration b/c Jesus uses it in other places.  Imagine Simon’s life is an apple tree and what he really wants to do is to give off really nice, delicious apples for everyone to see.  The problem is that some of the apples are good and some are bad.  What he thinks he needs is for the apple farmer to come by every week or two and take off the few bad apples here and there.  But the problem is there’s a sickness in the roots of his tree, and no matter how many bad apples the farmer takes off, more bad apples will grow back.  Simon’s solution to the problem is to ignore the sickness in his roots, hide his bad apples, and only show people the good apples; then everyone will think he’s a good apple tree.  That’s how Simon is and I think it’s how we often are; like Simon, we’re happy to have Jesus come around for a meal or two, help us knock off a few bad behaviors, as long as he leaves the rest alone.  But the sinful woman knows differently.  She only cares about what the farmer thinks of her apples.  She admits that the problem is not just her bad fruit but her bad roots, so instead of asking the farmer to come and knock off a few bad apples, she asks him to come and uproot her from the ground and replant her completely new.

What happens to Simon?  It doesn’t tell us.  What we know is that when the self-righteous man invited Him, Jesus went.  When Simon insulted Him, Jesus staid.  When Simon refused to apologize, Jesus taught.  When Simon hardened his heart, Jesus flung open the invitation to paradise, saying to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace,” to say to Simon how about you? Will you go in peace?  Will you have your sins forgiven by me or will the price be too high?  How about you?  Is the price too high?  Is it too hard to say, it’s not just the fruit it’s the root?  God flings open the door of His grace and mercy and says, I am sufficient to save the righteous and the unrighteous, the moral and the immoral, the religious and the irreligious, the sinner and the saint.  And how he would have you walk through.  If the Gospel is true, you don’t have to pretend anymore, if the Gospel is true, you no longer have to be strong, if the Gospel is true you no longer have to be enslaved to what everyone else thinks, if the Gospel is true you no longer have to have all the answers and pretend there’s no bad fruit, if the Gospel is true you no longer have to hide that skeleton in the closet, if the Gospel is true you can come now like the sinful woman, undignified, unabashed, uncaring about status and reputation, and fall at the feet of Jesus. 

Now, my real question here comes from my recent reading at the end of the Gospels about Jesus’ resurrection.  When reports spread that Jesus had been bodily raised from the dead, one disciple in particular, Thomas, says “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe (thus the name “Doubting Thomas, John 20.25).”  Well, Jesus actually shows up to let Thomas do exactly that.  He says to him, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side (John 20.27).”  So, if what I said in the first paragraph about God making everything new is true, then why does Jesus’ new body, which is the model of what ours will be (Philippians 3.20), retain these brutal scars of suffering?  Didn’t God make them new?  Didn’t God heal?  Didn’t God wipe away those tears?  Why does Jesus still bear these scars in His new body? 

The answer I believe is that of course God has healed, but the scars are not simply forgotten as though Jesus had never previously lived; instead, they are redeemed.  Jesus’ scars now are the marks of redemption; Jesus’ scars are now the mark of reconciliation; Jesus’ scars are now the mark of forgiveness, atonement, love, peace, joy, and intercession.  He has not forgotten that He has suffered; rather He remembers in His suffering the great act of salvation He achieved.  God has vindicated Him and wiped away his pain, but the suffering He experienced in the past only makes the glory He experiences in the present all the more sweet.  For us, I definitely believe God will give us completely new, healed, disease-free bodies (see I Corinthians 15.42-57), but I believe he will do it in such a way that the new life we experience with Him for eternity will be all the sweeter and more enjoyable because of (not in spite of) the suffering we experienced temporarily here. 

One pastor compared this to a dream he had where his whole family was brutally murdered.  When he awoke, having experienced that horrendous grief and loss, he found that his already deep love and enjoyment of his family was still further deepened and became still more enjoyable because of the temporary suffering.  So it will be for us.  In an almost unimaginable way, God will turn our marks of suffering and pain into beautiful testimonies of majestic redemption.  Eternal life will be infinitely better because we will eternally worship the God who will do these marvelous things.  Are you looking forward to the story God will write with your pain?

The following is my email response toMike regarding a few questions he had:

My intuition is that He will based on a few observations.  1.  Phil. 3.20 and I Cor. 15 use Jesus' resurrection body as the precursor to ours, and Paul promises us the joy of receiving a body like His.  2.  Jesus' scars are different than ours in that they are the marks of His atoning work and they bear eternal significance for our redemption.  3.  In Rev. 4-5 Jesus is worshipped and declared worthy b/c He was slain.  One of the enduring attributes that distinguish His glory above all others is His substitutionary death.  In those chapters, it is the fact that Christ was slain (before the foundation of the world in Rev. 13.8) which is part of His eternal praise, thus it will never be forgotten but will be part of our worship and adoration of Him forever and ever.  Having said that, we don't have any ultimate conclusions, but I surmise it from those points.

I think the tension in which God and Jesus live right now, as it relates to the already and not yet, is at least 3-fold.  1.  The last time Jesus was on earth He was mocked, beaten, spit upon, and killed, and though His Kingdom be inaugurated it is not yet full b/c He does not yet experience the full joy of being bowed to and praised by all of humanity.  This is promised to Him in Phil. 2.10-11.  2.  The earth is still subject to frustration (Romans 8.20).  He is the one who subjected it and all His creation awaits the revealing of the sons of God, thus living in tension (Romans 8 even remarks that the Spirit is groaning with us as we wait).  3.  On a related note, God's glory does not yet cover the world as the waters cover the sea (Hab. 2.14), and so God waits in tension for the fullness of His majesty to be revealed in the world.  Many subpoints could be added there and there are probably other main points as well, those are just what came immediately to mind.  

As far as your comments about Daniel, I totally agree and think I will amend my comments to make it more clear.  The point I was trying to make was that we will get new glorified bodies that are not subject to decay.  I don't believe there will be blindness, crippling, sickness, etc.  My point, I guess, would be that I think little Daniel will actually experience MORE joy in the new heavens b/c of the binding and suffering he experienced here.  I think His ability to run without pain will be more enjoyable than mine b/c He's experienced a depth of suffering which I probably never will.  Maybe an illustration would be someone who thought he would be a parapalegic for life regaining feeling and beginning to walk again.  He would probably never take another step in his life that didn't involve gratitude and enjoyment whereas the rest of us take it for granted.  

Since we have been so focused on the suffering and pain in the world, often asked in the form of “Why do bad things happen to good people,” I wanted to turn the tables a bit and ask the alternate question which is almost never considered, “Why do good things happen to bad people?”  There is a verse in Scripture that prompts me to do this (many actually, but this one says it best).  Romans 11.22 says, “Consider then the kindness and the severity of God.”  We have considered the severity, and now I want to consider the kindness.  Many of us, me included, are quick to ask God why or to blame him when something doesn’t go our way, and yet we rarely take the time to consider Him when things are well.  Today, I just want to offer three very brief lines of thought on this subject. 

First, look at the world.  Do you realize that God could have created a dark, bleak, gray, flat plain of existence for us live out our days?  Instead, in contrast to every other major worldview, the Christian God created the universe out of joy and delight (his and ours!).  With each passing day of creation he sat back and took pleasure in all that He had made.  So day in and day out we experience the wonder and beauty of sunrises and sunsets, snowstorms and thunderstorms, the warmth and the cold, the dry and the wet.  The world is filled with colors of every hue, landscapes of every size, and species of every type.  God gave us a world teeming with such variety and diversity of animals, insects, and vegetation that even after thousands and thousands of years, we are yet to discover and classify them all.  Take time today to observe the sky, look closely at a tree, or just examine the grass and the insects that live there.  Do we realize the immense kindness of God in such continued acts of beauty?

Second, look at your life.  Simply by the fact that you are able to read this blog, I can guess that you have a home or apartment with running water and electricity, access to the internet, and some means of transportation.  This puts you in the top 5% of income earners in the world.  Though many of you have likely experienced financial crises, you still remain more affluent than 95% of people on the face of the earth.  Consider what capabilities you have.  I just returned from a short walk around the block, an activity I take for granted every day.  I have the ability to think, write, and discuss.  I have a relational capacity where I can experience and enjoy the other people in my life.  I will go home from work today and take a hot shower.  Many of us have different capacities and capabilities but nevertheless, these are kindnesses from God to which most of us now feel entitled to rather than blessed by.  In other words, we experience them as what the world owes us rather than free gifts from a good God.

Third, look at Jesus.  He has entered and experienced suffering with you.  Not only that, but He has experienced the ultimate suffering of hell itself, deciding to drink the cup of suffering to the dregs rather than have you sip the foam for all eternity.  He has not only created a beautiful world and given you blessings to count, He has called you to come to Him, to drink of His salvation, to taste His goodness, to delight in His pleasure, to be part of His family, and to be part of His work to recreate this world and further spread His blessing.  We must see God’s ultimate kindness, not in the things He can do for us, but in the person He is for us.  After all, we don’t simply rejoice in the fact of the sunbeam which gives us light, but we trace the sunbeam back to its origin, the sun itself.  In the same way, we must not finish this task by looking around us and concluding, “Well, it is true, we do have many things for which we should be more thankful.”  That would only be half of the story.  The right ending is to trace those wonderful gifts back to an even more wonderful Giver and to begin to enjoy, adore, worship, and serve the kind of God who would give such things.  The last thing we must do is to consider ourselves citizens or taxpayers in some divine or universal economy where we pay our taxes/dues, live within the system, and expect the rights we are due to flow accordingly.  God will be a debtor to no one!  Rather, we must see that we are undeserving recipients of beauty, and thus to consider not just the kindness of God but to consider the God who is kind.

I believe we need to know that God is angry.  Much of the talk about God today is sappy sentimentalism.  The fact that God is love somehow comes to mean that He’s the ‘nice guy in the sky’ who sits back in a big recliner and puts a big rubber stamp of approval and affirmation on everything that happens.  But since when is love, sitting back and doing nothing while loved ones are destroyed, when has love ever meant approval of injustice, when does love mean letting oppression rule, when does love mean not caring about the downward spiral of the ones you love?  So, you’re darn right that God is angry.  He better be angry when His children are victimized, when His creation is ruined, when families are abandoned, when diseases take lives, and when relationships are destroyed.  If He is not angry, He is not just.  People ask, 'What kind of loving God is filled with wrath?' But any loving person is often filled with wrath. In Hope Has Its Reasons, Becky Pippert writes, 'Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it…Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference.' Pippert then quotes E. H. Gifford, 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.' She concludes: “If I, a flawed narcissistic sinful woman, can feel this much pain and anger over someone's condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them? God's wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer of sin which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.”

After all, what is God’s wrath if it is not God’s willingness, commitment, authority, and power to dispel all that disrupts His glorious shalom (His peace, wholeness, beauty in the world)?  What is God’s wrath if it is not the fulfillment of His eternal desire to set the world free by liberating it from evil, suffering, brokenness, and death?  The question then, is how can we be angry at God for allowing suffering and then also angry at him for his willingness to do away with suffering?  Why do we want to have God both ways, i.e. gentle, nice, and loving while simultaneously being strong enough to oppose and destroy suffering and pain?  I think the answer (and the modern offense) lies in the fact that God says that the problem of suffering and pain is rooted in human sin AND He says that sin is in us (not merely outside of us).  As long as God is judging perpetrators of evil in Darfur, we are happy, but when God gets personal with us, we get nervous.  But what has God determined in his judgment of us?

Here, I believe we need to take another look at Jesus and His cross.  Pastor Tim Keller writes, "Unless we come to grips with this terrible doctrine [hell and judgment], we will never even begin to understand the depths of what Jesus did for us on the cross. His body was being destroyed in the worst possible way, but that was a flea bite compared to what was happening to his soul. When he cried out that his God had forsaken him, he was experiencing hell itself…If a mild acquaintance denounces you and rejects you—that hurts. If a good friend does the same—the hurt's far worse. However, if your spouse walks out on you, saying, 'I never want to see you again,' that is far more devastating still. The longer, deeper, and more intimate the relationship, the more torturous is any separation…But the Son's relationship with the Father was beginning-less and infinitely greater than the most intimate and passionate human relationship. When Jesus was cut off from God, he went into the deepest pit and most powerful furnace, beyond all imagining. And he did it voluntarily, for us."  Here’s the point: The measure of how much you love someone is determined solely by how much of yourself you are willing to give up, to sacrifice, to ensure his or her welfare. What does this say about the love of God as it relates to his anger? It says that he loves us with a “love supreme” (to borrow a phrase from Jazz artist John Coltrane), such that he would rather die than punish us. He would rather eat the wrath and fury and judgment Himself than see us pay for all of our sins. Once you understand this, you are humbled to the dust, and even learn to delight in a God who is angry at all sin, which violates his peace. Only Christianity gives us a God who makes peace with those who have declared war on him (Romans 5:8).  You do not know how much Jesus loves you unless you know how much He’s suffered for you. 

When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail, he remarked that the only way to know that a law is unjust is if there’s a divine, higher law from God that tells us so.  If there were no divine law from God, then how could anyone know if a human law was out of accord or not?  With what would it be out of accord?  If there is no God, someone could say that a law was unjust but that would be according to their standards or their feelings.  Let’s take it a step further to say that if there is no God, then there is no way to say that an historical situation is unjust.  If there is nothing but nature, what is more natural than violence; it’s how you and I got here—natural selection, the strong eating the weak.  Dostoevsky wrote, “If God is dead, then all things are permissible.”  If there is no God, then on what possible basis could you object that the natural order of violence is unnatural?  On what basis do we ask for a better world?  Without a God, what we have is what we should expect, namely suffering and pain.  Without a God there would be no reason to construct any concept of injustice or suffering or pain, for on what would it be based?  The better question to ask is if there is no God, why do I (and apparently all humans) have an innate sense of justice, right, and what “ought to be.”  It’s hard to get those feelings and desires unless a personal God made us like Him to desire those things and unless a personal God created a world intended to be pain free.  So suffering and evil is a problem for the existence of God but an even bigger problem for the absence of God!

Nobody could say this better than the one time atheist C.S. Lewis:  "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

In the end, I believe we must force ourselves back to the beginning question of fickle hearts, namely does my concept of God really center on me and not on Him?  In other words, do we believe in God only when He is granting our desires and functioning after our model of God like a genie in a bottle or do we believe in a God who is bigger than our own small perceptions of Him, a God who is big enough to have perfect reasons for allowing suffering to continue?  Indeed, if you have a God who is big enough to be angry at for not stopping suffering, then you have a God who is big enough to have very good reasons beyond our comprehension for allowing it to continue.  You can’t have it both ways.

One of the best and most powerful statements regarding God’s seeming absence in a suffering world comes in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, chapter 4 when Ivan is talking to Alyosha about Russian children:

There was a little girl of five who was hated by her mother and father…This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents.  They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise.  Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy (outhouse), and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this.  And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans!

Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark in the cold and weep her meek, unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?  Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice?  Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted?  Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil.  Why should he know that diabolic good and evil when it costs so much?  Why the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to dear, kind God!

Dostoevsky’s description is powerful and must be answered.  Many Christians have responded rightly that God Himself experienced and took on our suffering and pain on the cross, but I think we must take this a step further.  I believe it is even more comforting in our pain if God not only experienced suffering but experienced the reality we feel of a God who could stop it but doesn’t.  As I was reading Luke 23 a few months ago I had a thought on that issue and here’s my attempt to get at it.  This will serve as the first of many “answers” to this problem. 

We must see that not stopping suffering is a question of which God Himself has faced the pain.  Take a look at Luke 23.35-38.  Notice what the crowd cries out to Jesus, “He saved others; let him save Himself, if He is the Christ of God, His chosen one.  If you are the king of the Jews, then save yourself!”  They are calling on him, not to stop the suffering of the world but to stop His own suffering.  They are mocking God for not stopping the blood-letting.  Does God have the power to stop it?  Of course, remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 26.53, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”  In other words, more than 60,000 angels with flaming swords would be at His bleeding side in a moment if He called them.  Now put yourself in the Father’s place, watching your Son be tortured, hearing Him scream out, seeing the mocking, watching Him rise to gasp for air only to slide back down again breathless, hearing Him be rejected, and observing His death, all while you had the power to send more than 12 legions of angels to His side.  You better believe if that were my son, I would move heaven and earth to be there; I would be an unstoppable force to armies, soldiers, bystanders, and weapons.  And yet God watched on; Jesus died on.  God Himself has faced the reality of not stopping His own suffering infinitely more powerfully than we ever will b/c He not only allows suffering to continue in our world but He allowed it for His own Son.  We face the pain of powerless suffering, where we have little control over the situation, but God faced the pain of powerful suffering, that is, suffering with the full power to end it and yet letting it continue in horror.  There would have to be an amazing reason to do something like that, and there is.  He did that for the infinitely valuable result of the salvation of you, me, all of creation, and the display of the infinite riches of His glory.  Christianity is the only religion that gives us a God who is not removed from suffering but comes and Himself takes on the suffering that should have been mine and should have been yours.  He does not require your blood but provides His own.  John Stott says that he personally could not believe in God if not for the cross where the One who is all powerful humbles Himself and suffers a type of punishment that you and I will never experience.  So, we don’t know fore sure what the reason for suffering is but we know what it isn’t, what it can’t be.  It can’t be b/c He doesn’t love us; it can’t be b/c He doesn’t care; it can’t be b/c He’s aloof.  God loves us and hates suffering so much that He was willing to come get involved in it personally.

            Next time we’ll ask if giving up believing in God all together would help us out of this problem…