Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Statement of faith

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I’ve been mulling this post for a while, and I might as well go ahead and put it up.  I am, by temperament and reaction to experience, a pessimist; I’m the sort who thinks the problem with Murphy is that he tried too hard to look on the bright side of things.  When things are going well, I have a hard time relaxing and enjoying it, because I figure that every silver lining has its cloud and that the greatest danger in life is complacency.  I mistrust when things come too easily, or line up too neatly—the universe is simply too cross-grained to come up cooperative without a fight, or a trick.  The advantage of pessimism is that it greatly reduces (though nothing can eliminate) the number of unpleasant surprises; and as a recovering control freak, I don’t like unpleasant surprises.  I much prefer to have contingency plans in place, when I’m smart enough to come up with them.

This is, of course, not all there is to be said about me; I also have a weird optimistic streak, and sometimes I’m not sure how these two things coexist.  But it does mean that trust and faith come very, very hard for me; there are very few people in this world whom I could honestly say I trust more than provisionally, and I can’t honestly claim to trust God all that much either, a lot of the time.  I know people for whom faith in God comes easily, where I have to fight for it, and at times I’ve felt myself to be inferior to them; now, I just figure that it’s a matter of different spiritual gifts, and that their greater gift of faith serves one purpose where my weaker gift serves another.  After all, Jesus didn’t say you need a lot of faith:  even if you have barely any at all, that’s enough.  What matters isn’t the size of our faith, but the size of the God in whom we put our faith.

But if faith comes so hard, why believe at all?

Partly it’s because, as I’ve argued before, we’re wired to believe; we can’t stand nowhere, and we can’t hold ourselves in abeyance (not for very long, anyway)—we inevitably settle somewhere.  The only question is whether we realize it or not.  Better, as a matter of tactics, tochoose to believe—better to pick your ground deliberately than just to end up where you end up.  Better to actively interrogate the universe, to search for truth and ask the hard questions, to come to the best conclusions you can; one must do so with proper humility, in the awareness that one could always be wrong (especially in the details, even if one’s fundamental conclusions are correct), but “humble” does not in any way mean “timid.”  Pick your ground and argue hard—drive both yourself and anyone who disagrees with you to the limits—because if you’re wrong, you need to be proven wrong, insofar as that’s possible, and the only way that can happen is if there are no holds barred and no punches pulled.

I know there are those who say that no one was ever argued into faith; that’s not true.  It doesn’t, by any means, happen this way for everybody; even among Vulcans, not everyone lives by logic.  But there are those who are argued into faith, and there are those of us whose faith requires argument; and if that doesn’t make for easy faith, it has its own virtue about it.  At the very least, it makes it easier to talk with others who don’t find faith coming easily.

For my part, I didn’t have to be argued into faith:  I grew up in a Christian home, the grandson and nephew of pastors.  That said, while the assumptions of my childhood were unquestionably Christian, they were not required to remain unquestioned; when I had questions, they were always taken seriously and answered fairly.  If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s certainly true that the unexamined (and unchallenged) faith is not worth holding; it’s the equivalent of a security program that’s never been tested by hackers.  My family, whether explicitly or simply by temperament and interest, understood this.  It’s one of the reasons I came out in such a different place in my faith from my grandmother the pastor (which, given the strong-willed, strong-minded and self-certain person that she was, made for some arguments that made the walls ring, let me tell you.

All this was a good thing, because it meant that I was free to interrogate my own faith when the time came that I needed to do so; and I did.  It was not enough that my family believed; not enough that I wanted to believe—indeed, I mistrusted (and mistrust) that desire, because such desire can easily trap you into betraying yourself.  As Bacon said, people prefer to believe what they prefer to be true—and if your preference leads you away from believing what really is true, that gives reality an opening to take you down from behind.  I want to believe what is true partly for noble reasons, and partly out of sheer self-defense, because everything we believe that is not so renders us vulnerable in some way.

(If it’s true that knowledge is power, it’s primarily in this:  that knowledge, which we may define as having what we believe about the world be in conformity with the reality of the world as it actually is in itself, means that we don’t misevaluate ourselves, our situation, and the challenges we face, and thus are able to properly determine how to use whatever actual power we possess as we seek to manage our situation and respond to those challenges.)

As such, I’m not ashamed to say that my faith is, or was, a faith of the intellect first; the affective dimensions developed more slowly, and later.  This is why believing with the mind and trusting with the gut are very different things for me; I’d fail the Niagara test nine times out of ten, I expect, a walking advertisement for the truth of Flannery O’Connor’s observation that “it’s harder to believe than not to”—even, at times, if one already does believe.

And I do believe.  I’ve read Calvin and Luther and some of the Church Fathers, the Enlightenment philosophers and their modern counterparts, and I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about existentialism in its various forms; and I have come to the conclusion, for whatever it may be worth, that the Christian faith, and specifically that understanding of it mediated through the teaching of Augustine of Hippo and Calvin of Geneva, offers the best, the truest and deepest, account yet managed by human beings of the reality of existence.  Theologically, I believe that this represents the outworking of God’s providential promise to my parents and to the church in which I was raised for my salvation; existentially, if you will, I say that this is the means by which God’s Spirit has worked in my life.  It all comes to the same thing, in the end.  As I say, this particular path has its own virtue about it; but it does mean that I find myself all too often crying out with the father of the demoniac, “Lord, I believe!—help me with my unbelief . . .”

That’s the reason why, not long after I started blogging in earnest, I posted Andrew Peterson’s song “No More Faith”:

I say faith is a burden—
It’s a weight to bear;
It’s brave and bittersweet.
And hope is hard to hold to;
Lord, I believe,
Only help my unbelief
‘Till there’s no more faith.

And it’s the reason why, a couple weeks later, I posted his friend Andrew Osenga’s song “We Are the Beggars at the Foot of God’s Door”:

We have known the pain of loving in a dying world,
And our lies have made us angry at the truth—
But Cinderella’s slipper fits us perfectly,
And somehow we’re made royalty with You.

O we of little faith, O You of stubborn grace . . .
We are the beggars, we are the beggars,
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door.

That (sometimes despite myself) I believe, in trust that it’s not about my little faith, but about God’s stubborn grace:  we are (as Malcolm Muggeridge originally said) beggars at the foot of God’s door, if we can set aside our pride long enough to accept the position—and our joy is that he has welcomed us in.

Good pick for Obama

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Unlike his successor as King County Executive, Ron Sims (whom the Obama administration tapped as deputy secretary at HUD), former Washington governor Gary Locke, whom the president has apparently chosen as his (third) nominee for Commerce, was someone I always respected.  He’s not as clean as reports would have you believe, as the folks at Sound Politics point out, but his fundraising misfeasance appears to have been relatively minor as these things go; he was an effective governor, a good administrator and to all appearances a man of good character, and generally pro-business and pro-free trade, which is important in a Commerce Secretary.  Since he’s also a loyal Democrat and an ethnic minority, here’s hoping his appointment quashes the administration’s unconstitutional attempt to take over the U. S. Census.Update:  from the AP article, it sounds like the administration will indeed leave the Census in the Commerce Department:

If confirmed by the Senate, Locke would assume control of a large agency with a broad portfolio that includes overseeing many aspects of international trade, oceans policy and the 2010 census. . . .”Who oversees the census won’t change,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, adding that the director of it always reports to the commerce secretary. “I think members of Congress and the White House both have an interest in a fair and accurate census count.”

My hope, given that, is that Secretary Locke won’t bow to pressure to politicize the census, but will allow it to operate in as apolitical a fashion as possible.

The hypocrisy of professional liberals keeps growing

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By that I mean the left wing of our political class and their hangers-on in the media (a group which constitutes most of the MSM, which is why the Left is now preparing to try to destroy all other forms of media).  As the Anchoress sums it up,

Seems increasingly like all the “Fascist Bush” caterwauling was the usual fake, dishonest theater meant as a means to an end—the end being to destroy the hated “election stealer” and his legacy, and not much more.But you know, for someone who “did everything wrong,” his policies suddenly seem wise and right to some surprising people. . . .So, the FISA stays, Gitmo (despite all the righteous-sounding rhetoric) is not so bad, after all. Terrorist-suspected detainees do not enjoy constitutional rights, after all. Patriot Act, stays. Whether succeeding presidents will abuse the powers Bush put in place to protect us is rather less a question than a surety. Not an “if” but a “when.” And that is troubling, oh yes.

Read the whole thing; as usual, she has a lot of links to some very interesting things.  The interesting thing to me about all this is that the hypocrisy she decries is, as I said in the title, that of professional liberals—by which I do not mean liberals who are professionals, but rather people who earn their money by being liberal and representing liberal positions in some way.  What we’re seeing here on the part of those folks is the betrayal of a lot of liberal positions and a lot of liberal beliefs—not all, by any means, but a fair number of them—and all the strongly-worded unequivocal promises Barack Obama offered to go with them.Now, from my point of view, there are real benefits to that.  One, as a foreign-policy realist, I believe that our country will be the safer for it; the chances of a nightmare scenario are much lower than they would be had President Obama actually kept the promises made by Candidate Obama.  Two, this will help (and indeed, seems to be already helping) rehabilitate President Bush, because it is in effect an admission by many of his loudest critics that they were wrong; not just for history but even in this era, folks are unlikely to be able to argue with any credibility that President Bush was bad for doing things that President Obama was good for doing.The interesting question to me in all this is, will the vast majority of American liberals sell out on this the way that the vast majority of American conservatives sold out on other issues during the last eight years?  Doug Hagler has argued repeatedly in comments on this blog that there effectively is no conservative party in our economic policy; he’s been absolutely right about that because the conservative core of the GOP essentially sold out those issues (and others) in order to support the president on the GWOT and judicial nominees.  The result, ultimately, was electoral catastrophe for the party.  Some folks are now arguing that conservative Republicans should have gone into opposition years ago in order to preserve their own integrity and avoid being lumped in with the GOP Establishment types who were setting so much of the government’s policy (and doing so quite poorly).It is, of course, too early to argue that liberals in this country should do the same with respect to the Obama administration; I’m not even sure there’s a good case that conservatives should have done so, though I agree that at the very least, there should have been some strong conservative challenges to some of the Bush administration’s policies.  It’s too early to predict whether blind adherence by the Left to the Obama administration will end as badly as the Right’s blind adherence to the Bush administration did.  But it isn’t too early to predict that if the liberal movement makes the same mistake in the coming years as the conservative movement did in the years just past, they will likely come to the end of this administration feeling the same way the conservative movement has been feeling:  like they’ve lost their soul.Remember, put not your trust in princes.  No matter how often you kiss them, they’re all still frogs at heart.

Jerusalem, San Francisco, and the meaning of eyewitnesses

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In the comments on my post on worship and atheism, FVThinker is trying to argue (among other things) that “all the conflicting stories re: his resurrection” constitute sufficient reason to deny the Resurrection of Christ. Now, in the first place, I deny the assertion, which is just one more tired leftover from liberal German scholarship of a century and more ago; but let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that we grant the point. Does this in fact constitute a compelling argument against the historicity of the Resurrection?No, it doesn’t. To understand why, consider a more recent historical incident, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. If you’ve read Simon Winchester’s excellent book A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, then you probably remember that in the Prologue, Winchester quotes from five eyewitness accounts of the quake. Consider the following.

At the precise moment when the members of this quintet—three of them very distinguished men of science and two others of relatively modest social standing—were undertaking their very mundane activities . . . it was twelve minutes after five o’clock in the morning.However, this was a matter of provable fact only for the Englishman, so far as the record relates.  His name was George Davidson, and he, like his fellow scientists, wrote about the event that was to follow with a certain icy detachment.  He took care to mark the time that he first noticed something happening:  Suddenly and without warning his room, his house, and the very land all was standing upon began to shake, with a great, ever-increasing, and uncontrollable violence.It was, he knew full well, an earthquake.It came, he later reported,

from north to south, and the only description I am able to give of its effect is that it seemed like a terrier shaking a rat.  I was in bed, but was awakened by the first shock.  I began to count the seconds as I went towards the table where my watch was, being able through much practice closely to approximate the time in that manner.  The shock came at 5.12 o’clock.  The first sixty seconds were the most severe.  From that time on it decreased gradually for about thirty seconds.  There was then the slightest perceptible lull.  Then the shock continued for sixty seconds longer, being slighter in degree in this minute than in any part of the preceding minute and a half.  There were two slight shocks afterwards which I did not time.

Professor Davidson must have been as terrified as anyone, but he was a man trained to observe, and he knew in an instant what was taking place. . . .  the first full series of hard shocks, say his notes, lasted until 5h 13m 00s.  The shocks were slightly less from that point until 5h 13m 30s, then there was a slight lull, and by 5h 14m 30s all was quiet again. . . .  The official report on the earthquake said, in a tone that brooked no dispute, “We shall accept Professor Davidson’s time as the most accurate obtainable for San Francisco.

The second eyewitness account Winchester considers is that of the meteorologist Alexander George McAdie.

Professor McAdie was an ambitious and a punctilious man, and at the very moment that he was awakened . . . both his ambition and his scrupulous regard for factual observation . . . came promptly to the fore.  As had been his custom ever since he went through the Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886 (“for twenty years I have timed every earthquake I have felt,” he was later to write”), the instant he awoke and felt movement he clicked on his flashlight, noted the time on his fob watch, and recorded in his notebook everything that transpired.

I have lookt up the record in my note-book made on April 18, 1906, while the earthquake was still perceptible.  I find the entry “5h 12m” and after that “Severe lasted nearly 40 seconds.”  As I now remember it the portion “severe, etc.” was entered immediately after the shaking.

The only snag was that poor Professor McAdie somehow managed to misread his watch during all the confusion, and he wreathed himself in a magnificent maze of complications as he tried to explain the mistake.  He wrote that the day before the earthquake,

my error was “1 minute slow” at noon by time-ball, or time signals received in Weather Bureau and which my watch has been compared for a number of years.  The rate of my watch is 5 seconds loss per day; therefore the corrected time of my entry is 5h 13m 05s AM.  This is not of course the beginning of the quake.  I would say perhaps 6 or more seconds may have elapsed between the act of waking, realizing, and looking at the watch and making my entry.  I remember distinctly getting the minute-hand’s position, previous to the most violent portion of the shock.  The end of the shock I did not get exactly, as I was watching the second-hand, and the end came several seconds before I fully took in that the motion had ceased.  The second-hand was somewhere between 40 and 50 when I realized this.  I lost the position of the second-hand because of difficulty in keeping my feet, somewhere around the 20-second mark.However, there is one uncertainty.  I may have read my watch wrong.  I have no reason to think I did; but I know from experience such things are possible.  I have the original entries untouched since the time they were made.

The official report accepts that the unfortunate man did effect an error in making what was probably the most critical observation of his career—but, out of courtesy, adds that such a mistake would have been very easy to make.  The one-minute error is, then, officially compensated for, and Alexander McAdie enters the lists as having, essentially, timed the Great San Francisco Earthquake as beginning at 5h 12m 05s, recorded that it became extremely severe at 5h 12m 25s, and noted that it tailed off into bearable oblivion at 5h 12m 50s.  The whole event, in McAdie’s eyes, extended over little more than forty seconds—about half the time that Davidson had computed, from his observations that were made a little bit closer to town.

One of the other eyewitnesses Winchester cites is Fred Hewitt, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner.

It was some minutes after five o’clock when he and his two friends crossed Golden Gate Avenue, spent five minutes talking to a pair of policemen—”blue-coated guardians” as he later wrote for his paper—and said their farewells.  Hewitt had turned north, the policemen back south down Larkin, when suddenly:

The ground rose and fell like an ocean at ebb tide.  Then came the crash . . . I saw those policement enveloped by a shower of falling stone.It is impossible to judge the length of that shock.  To me it seemed like an eternity.  I was thrown prone on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing.  Around me the huge buildings, looking more terrible becasue of the queer dance they were performing, wobbled and veered.  Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. . . .The first portion of the shock was just a mild forerunning of what was to follow.  The pause in the action of the earth’s surface couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second. . . . Then came the second and more terrific crash.

Now, in this collection of testimony from three different observers—including two professional scientists, people trained to observe, measure, and record things with uncommon precision—we see discrepancies in the details.  Indeed, between the two scientists we see discrepancies in their accounts of the start time and length of the quake which, given the level of precision to which they were trained and which they were attempting, can only be described as significant; and we have another witness who declares, “It is impossible to judge the length of that shock,” and offers another differing account of the quake’s progress.  We have here, at the least, “conflicting stories re:  the earthquake.”The question is, what can we conclude from these discrepancies?  Specifically, can we conclude that the earthquake didn’t happen?  Clearly, we can’t; the inference is logically unjustifiable—a point which is made helpfully obvious in this case by the fact that the earthquake is recent enough that we still have lots of other evidence as well which bears witness to it.  Even if several hundred or thousand years in the future, it somehow happened that the only record of that earthquake was these three statements, scholars of that future time would in no way be justified in concluding that because of these discrepancies, they could dismiss the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as ahistorical—and if they insisted on doing so anyway, they would be arguing illogically to reach a false conclusion.What needs to be understood here is that whatever differences there may be in the details of these three reports, they agree on the core facts:  some little time past 5am in the cold morning of April 18, 1906, a major earthquake hit San Francisco, California, and their world was shaken, and their lives were never the same again.  Whatever they disagree on, they testify to that much with firm unanimity, and so their collective statements in fact provide strong support for the existence and significance of that event.The same may be said of the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.  Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, actual discrepancies and contradictions in the details of the accounts, they agree on the core facts:  Jesus died on a Roman cross; his body was sealed in a rock tomb behind a heavy stone door; the following Sunday, the stone was found moved away from the tomb, and the tomb was empty; no one ever produced his body; and in fact, he appeared again alive on various occasions to various of his followers.  Whatever they might be said to disagree on, the reports agree that some time that Sunday morning, Jesus was raised from the dead, and their world was shaken, and their lives were never the same again; they testify to that much with firm unanimity, and so their collective statements in fact provide strong support for the existence and significance of that event.  To seize on alleged discrepancies as an excuse to conclude otherwise is every bit as logically unjustifiable as it would be to conclude from the eyewitness statements quoted above that there was no earthquake in San Francisco in 1906.The fact is, eyewitness testimony always varies—always. People see different things, perceive things differently, assign different levels of importance to various details, and yes, make mistakes and misremember things, even if they’re doing their best to be accurate.  Variance in eyewitness testimony is therefore to be expected.  Indeed, if you have a group of eyewitnesses who all tell the exact same story with no variation, that’s a pretty good sign that they’ve gotten together to get their stories straight, and thus that their testimony is probably unreliable in some way.  What the differences in the scriptural accounts primarily demonstrate is that there was no collusion between the witnesses—which is, on the whole, a good thing, and speaks more to their basic reliability than the reverse.

The absolute sovereignty of God

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I am the Lord, and there is no other;
besides me there is no God.
I equip you, [Cyrus,] though you do not know me,
that people may know, from the rising of the sun
and from the west, that there is none besides me;
I am the Lord, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
I make well-being and create calamity,
I am the Lord, who does all these things.—Isaiah 45:5-7 (ESV)The Lord is in control in everything that happens—everything.  This is not to say that God desires bad things to happen, as if he enjoyed them; but it is to say that nothing happens apart from God’s power and his sustaining will. There is nothing good that does not come from his hand, and there is no trouble and no disaster that does not happen on his sufferance. God could, for instance, have prevented 9/11; he could have given Osama bin Laden a fatal accident years ago, or changed Bill Clinton’s mind to green-light bin Laden’s assassination, or had him knifed in the back by some Afghan tribesman. He didn’t choose to do that. He could have prevented our current economic crisis—fairly easily, in fact; he didn’t choose to do that either. I don’t know his reasons, for these or for any other disasters, and I won’t presume to declare the mind of God; but whether he decreed them for judgment or permitted them for other purposes, the testimony of Scripture is clear that they happened only by God’s will. Indeed, Scripture is clear that nothing happens, for good or ill, that is not in some way an expression of the sovereign will of Almighty God.This is a hard word for us. That God sends good things—yes, of course.  That only God deserves the credit for the good things that come to us—which is to say, that we can’t take credit for them ourselves—is usually not something we want to consider. Indeed, for many people, that’s a painfully hard idea to accept. But that God sends bad things—that’s something else again. Does that make God the author of evil?There are those who have believed so, and who have responded either by rejecting God or by rejecting the biblical testimony to his power and lordship. But the truth is, it doesn’t. God did not create evil—he could not do any such thing, because it’s completely contrary to his nature—nor did he ever desire that evil things should happen. However, when our first ancestors fell into sin, he chose not to obliterate them, toss out the world he’d made, and start over, but rather to put a plan in motion to redeem their sin; as a consequence, while he may at times prevent us from sinning and forbid disasters from occurring, there are other times when, for his own purposes, he doesn’t. The important thing is that there is no evil he permits in which he is not in some way at work in order to redeem it—and there is no suffering he allows in which he does not share, in the body of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. God is not aloof from the pain of this world; in Christ, he has borne it all.(Excerpted from “God’s Mysterious Way”)

God’s Mysterious Way

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(Isaiah 44:24-45:13; Romans 9:14-21)

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the one who formed you in your mother’s womb: “I am the Lord, who made all things; I alone stretched out the heavens above you, and no one helped me spread out the earth beneath your feet. I am the one who reveals false prophets for the fools they are and brings their predictions to nothing, and who makes nonsense of the knowledge of those who consider themselves wise, while I confirm the words of my servants and cause their predictions to be fulfilled. I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I form the light and create darkness; I bring well-being and create disaster. I am the Lord who does all these things.”

This is the word of the Lord. In this passage, God gets down to details about how he’s going to set his people free from Babylon—he even names names: he’s going to raise up a conqueror named Cyrus, the king of a pagan nation, and use this pagan who doesn’t even know him to return the Jews to Jerusalem and begin the process of rebuilding the city and temple of God. Such a claim invites two different reactions from two different groups of people. One, what right does he have to claim to do this? And two, how dare God use a pagan conqueror to accomplish his purposes? Why doesn’t he raise up another Moses, another hero of Israel, to lead this second Exodus? The answer to both questions is this star-blasting affirmation of the absolute sovereignty, the absolute lordship and the absolute right of rule, of God. This is of course something that’s been stressed a few times already in the chapters leading up to this one, but it reaches a new level and a new pitch of intensity here. Just consider the levels on which God’s sovereignty is asserted in this passage.

One, the Lord is the one who formed you in the womb. He made, specifically, you. Your character, your body, your gifts, your strengths and weaknesses, the things you value and the things you dislike, aren’t simply the semi-random product of your genes and your environment; sure, God used your genes, and he used the environment in which you grew up and in which you live, but he is the one who created you and who made you who you are. He gave you the gifts you would need to do the work for which he created you, and he gave you the character and temperament he desired you to have to be the person he wants you to be. Granted, to be human and not God is to be sinful, and so you also have traits that aren’t what God wants for you—but even those have been allowed for, and even in those, he’s at work to teach you to trust him and depend on him, and to trust and depend on others. The point is, God knows you far better and far more deeply than you know yourself, because he is wholly responsible for making you who you are, and he is Lord over your life not just at the superficial level, but all the way down to the deepest wellsprings of your character and nature.

Two, the Lord rules all creation because he made all of it. He is the Author of the story, and it’s his word that brought all things into being; as the author, he has absolute authority over everything that is in the same way as I have, under him, absolute authority over this sentence. Indeed, his is far greater, not only because his authority is over me and working through me as I author this sermon, but also because at any given point I might trip over my tongue and say something other than what I intend, while God never does such things. His authority is not only complete, unrestricted by any limitation whatsoever, it’s also perfect, unflawed by any error of any kind, and perfectly sufficient, not shared with anyone or anything beside himself. It’s not just that no power can compete with God’s—it’s that, as he declared in chapter 40, beside him there is no other power. He is the great Author of everyone and everything else that exists; there is nothing capable of rising off the page and wresting the pen from his hand. Any resistance or opposition to him lasts only as long as he permits it, and only within the bounds that he sets.

Three, the Lord rules over all things because there is no one else who can compare to him. There is no one else who has the power to do what he has done, and can do; he is unequalled in might. There is no one else who has the wisdom and understanding even to see the future, let alone to bring it about; others may try, but he frustrates their attempts and exposes their futility with no difficulty whatsoever. Only God can declare the future and then bring it about, and he can do so in any way he chooses; only he can raise up Cyrus and then open the way to conquest before him, such that no one will be able to resist his armies until he has accomplished all that the Lord intends for him to accomplish. Only the Lord formed the earth and set the sun, the moon and the stars in motion above it, and only he keeps it all together and keeps it all moving; he is unmatched in power, in wisdom, and in glory, and he has no rival, nor anyone even close.

Four, the Lord is in control in everything that happens—everything. “I am the Lord, and there is no other,” he declares. “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and I create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things.” This is not to say that God desires bad things to happen, as if he enjoyed them; but it is to say that nothing happens apart from God’s power and his sustaining will. There is nothing good that does not come from his hand, and there is no trouble and no disaster that does not happen on his sufferance. God could, for instance, have prevented 9/11; he could have given Osama bin Laden a fatal accident years ago, or changed Bill Clinton’s mind to green-light bin Laden’s assassination, or had him knifed in the back by some Afghan tribesman. He didn’t choose to do that. He could have prevented our current economic crisis—fairly easily, in fact; he didn’t choose to do that either. I don’t know his reasons, for these or for any other disasters, and I won’t presume to declare the mind of God; but whether he decreed them for judgment or permitted them for other purposes, the testimony of Scripture is clear that they happened only by God’s will. Indeed, Scripture is clear that nothing happens, for good or ill, that is not in some way an expression of the sovereign will of Almighty God.

This is a hard word for us. That God sends good things—yes, of course; that only God deserves the credit for the good things that come to us—which is to say, that we can’t take credit for them ourselves—is usually not something we want to consider. Indeed, for many people, that’s a painfully hard idea to accept. But that God sends bad things—that’s something else again. Does that make God the author of evil?

There are those who have believed so, and who have responded either by rejecting God or by rejecting the biblical testimony to his power and lordship. But the truth is, it doesn’t. God did not create evil—he could not do any such thing, because it’s completely contrary to his nature—nor did he ever desire that evil things should happen. However, when our first ancestors fell into sin, he chose not to obliterate them, toss out the world he’d made, and start over, but rather to put a plan in motion to redeem their sin; as a consequence, while he may at times prevent us from sinning and forbid disasters from occurring, there are other times when, for his own purposes, he doesn’t. The important thing is that there is no evil he permits in which he is not in some way at work in order to redeem it—and there is no suffering he allows in which he does not share, in the body of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. God is not aloof from the pain of this world; in Christ, he has borne it all.

In dealing with all this, we are of course in very deep water, looking into mysteries which are beyond our ability to comprehend; which is at least part of the reason why God’s plans are so often mysterious to us, and even at times seem to make no sense at all to us. This is particularly true when we think we have a better idea for what God could and should be doing; if he would just do this thing, we think, everything would be so much better than it is—so why isn’t he doing it our way? That seems to have been the response of some, perhaps many, in Israel when God declared that he would return his people to their homeland through the work of a conquering pagan king, rather than through the heroic leadership of one of his own people; and to them, God directs one further statement of his lordship: “Who do you think you are to argue with me? Does the clay have the right to complain about what the potter makes from it? Does the pot have the ability to question the potter’s skill? Or does anyone have the right to go to a parent and question whether their child has the right to exist? Please, feel free to give me your orders—I’m only the creator of the universe, after all; I’m sure you have much to tell me that I don’t already know.”

This is, of course, a potent blend of irony and sarcasm designed to give a real kick to God’s point: we don’t know enough to question his plans and his decisions. God alone sees everything, and he alone is aware of everything that has to be considered, and it’s on that basis of his total awareness and infinite understanding that he has set his plans in motion; we only see a part of the picture, and a small part at that, where he sees the whole. If he chooses to advance his purposes not by giving us success, but by giving success to someone we don’t like, someone who doesn’t even know him or give him credit, that might not make sense to us—but God sees a lot more of the picture than we do. If he chooses to show mercy to some and not others, to bless some and not others, that’s not unjust, because the truth is that none of us can claim to deserve his mercy and his blessing; God is not capricious and he doesn’t act for no reason, but he has perfectly good reasons for everything he does. We just don’t see them. The mystery of God’s ways really isn’t in God at all, it’s in us—in our limited perceptions, and the limitations of our minds and our ability to understand what’s really going on.

I said last week that the first lesson God tries to teach his people—over and over and over again—is “Trust me. Trust me. Trust me”; and that’s ultimately the point of this passage. In the easy times, when you have plenty of money and everything’s going well, trust God that he’s providing for you, and giving you extra to give away to those in need, and to store up for the hard times when they come. In times of disaster, trust God that he’s still with you and still working for your good, that he’s allowed the disaster and that he’ll bring you through it—that even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need fear no evil, for he is with you, and the rod of his strength and the staff of his guidance comfort you. In times when the way before you is clear, trust God that he has opened the way, and in times when you can’t see where to go, trust him that he’s holding you by the hand and leading you on, one step at a time. As the poet and hymnwriter William Cowper wrote, “You fearful saints, fresh courage take; the clouds you so much dread are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.”

Those aren’t just words on Cowper’s part, either; the story behind that hymn is an interesting one. Cowper battled mental illness for years, and the story is told that finally one day he decided to drown himself in the Thames. He called a cab and told the driver to take him down to the river, but the driver got lost in a thick London fog and couldn’t find his way; after driving around London blind for quite a while, the cabbie finally stopped and let Cowper out. Much to Cowper’s surprise, when he dismounted from the cab, he turned and found himself standing on the doorstep of his own home. God had allowed the illness with which he wrestled, but when it drove him to kill himself, that, God prevented; he had sent the fog to save Cowper’s life. Even in our blackest moments, God watches over us.

Usual order: read bill, then vote on it

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The Democratic Party thought it could get away with reversing that order when it came to the so-called “stimulus” bill (all 1000+ pages of it)—but there really is a reason for the usual order, as Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) found out:

Sen. Schumer has pledged to undo a provision included in the stimulus package that will make it nearly impossible for New York’s banks to hire foreign workers through the H-1B visa program.The amendment to the stimulus bill, proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chuck Grassley, D-Iowa, originally would have banned the visas for any company that received money from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP. A compromise lifted the ban, but companies will still be required to hire from the growing pool of laid-off American workers first. Advocates say that the mandate is so onerous that it will virtually stop banks from bringing foreign workers into the country.According to a report released last year by the Partnership for New York City, roughly 13,000 workers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are here on H-1B visas. The top visa sponsors in the area are the very same banks that have received TARP money. Those banks also have significant overseas operations, says Kathy Wylde, and this provision will hurt most when the economy turns around and the banks look to hire talent to tap new markets.“When they require someone with a language or other skill who they feel is the best person for the job, if they can’t bring them to New York, they will move the function,” says Wylde. “That’s what’s happened in the past when we’ve had a shortage of the H-1B visas.”Since the bill was signed with the provision included, Schumer will need to undo it in another bill, which could be tough sledding.“This is a counterproductive amendment that could hurt New York’s economy, and we are going to work hard to change it,” Schumer says.

As Moe Lane notes, the problem here for Sen. Schumer is

the banks in his state that would be affected by this are international . . . so if they can’t bring the workers into the country, they can take the work out of the country. Which is important because they’ll also end up sending other people’s work out of the country. Work done by people who are registered to vote in the State of New York, which is why Schumer’s now going full guns to get this rule reversed in future legislation.You know what would have stopped your little problem cold, Chuck? Reading the . . . bill in the first place. Which is your job, and the only one that an indulgent nation has ever required you to have. So lose the swarmy attitude next time and, you know, actually do some work for a change.

Act in haste, repent at leisure . . .