President Obama declared on national TV that “we have contained [ISIS]”; within hours of the broadcast, ISIS struck Paris, following hard on the heels of attacks in Beirut and Baghdad. Burundi, which not so long ago was sending peacekeeping forces to Somalia, is descending into a whirlpool of violence and nightmare. It’s easy to look around at the world and wonder, “Where is the hope?”Read more
Category Archives: Religion and theology
Faith and the “New Atheists”
I am—as anyone who spends any time poking around this blog can surely tell—a committed believer in Jesus Christ. Some days, I can also call myself a committed disciple of Jesus Christ; some days, not so much. As Andrew Peterson wrote in “The Chasing Song,”
Now and then these feet just take to wandering;
Now and then I prop them up at home.
Sometimes I think about the consequences—
Sometimes I don’t.
Still, for all my failures in living it out, I’m committed to the walk. I’m committed because I believe Jesus spoke truly when he told his disciples he is the way, the truth, and the life. I believe the people of God, from our founding in Abraham all the way through to the church of today, have been given the only true account of the existence of the material world, and the only true account of human existence. I don’t think any one branch of the Christian tradition has a perfect or complete understanding of that truth, and still less any individual believer; the fact that each of us is both limited and sinful ensures that our best understanding will be both incomplete and flawed. I believe God uses even those flaws to his own purposes.
I’m absolutely committed to Jesus because I believe that faith in him is true, even if my faith in him is only imperfectly true. If anyone could prove to me that the Christian faith is false, I would abandon it. That might seem like a hard right turn to some, but it isn’t; I want to believe what is true, not what is congenial. That’s why I’m still a Christian after forty-plus years of life and twelve-plus years in the pastorate.Read more
The threat of idolatry in worship
The Devil hates it when we worship God. Any time the body of Christ gathers to give God glory and hear the gospel preached, the Devil loses, and so he’ll do anything in his power to keep us from worship. On an individual basis, he’ll try to prevent it by convincing people not to come, but that doesn’t work on everyone. For all the Devil’s best efforts, a lot of people do still show up on Sunday mornings. So what’s he going to do? Yes, he’s doomed to fail, but he’s going to take as many people as he can down with him, and we should never underestimate his cunning. If he can’t keep us from worship, he’s going to try to neutralize our worship. He will do everything he can to turn our hearts away from our Lord by tricking us into worshiping someone or something other than Christ.
Tim Keller pointed out at the Gospel Coalition conference back in 2009 that we all have idols and temptations to idolatry. Whether it be our spouses, our kids, our reputations, our jobs, or our possessions, anything that’s truly meaningful to us and that truly matters in our lives can become so important to us that it takes God’s right and proper place in our hearts. The congregation we attend can become an idol, as can our denomination or religious tradition. So can our nation and our patriotism. For many churches, style of music is a major idol, while for others, the chief idol is their building.
These are all good things which we rightly love and value. We ought to love our families and our churches. It is right that we love our nation and thank God every day for blessing us to live here. We should value the work he has given us to do. It’s good to love music, which is a wonderful gift from God, and naturally we will prefer some styles of music to others. But every last one of these things must—must—come second in our hearts to God. We don’t need to love them less, but we need to love Jesus Christ more than any of them. Our first and foremost desire should be to serve and honor and glorify him by giving him pleasure; our love for all those other people and things should fall in order behind our love for him. Our worship needs to be directed to God and God alone. For the sake of our souls and the souls of others, we cannot afford to let anything else creep in.
(Excerpted, edited, from “To the Glory of God”)
Photo © 2009 Wikimedia user Wattewyl. License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
Let all the thirsty come
“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.”
—Isaiah 55:1-3 (ESV)
Contrary to what we might have expected, this invitation and this promise are offered to people who were already outwardly members of the people of God. The nations aren’t excluded here—the invitation is given to all who are thirsty—but there’s no explicit summons to them, either. The invitation is framed in terms of what God did in and for David. The point, which Isaiah has been making all along, is clear: though Israel has heard the law, and has heard the prophets, and they have all kinds of head knowledge about God, that hasn’t translated for them into any kind of real relationship with him. They consider him their God because they’re Israelites and he’s the God of Israel, and doesn’t everybody in this country worship God?—but many of them haven’t answered his invitation. Some probably haven’t really heard it before. They haven’t learned that there’s more to their faith than just being a faithful templegoer.
Indeed, there’s far more. The challenge to us of Isaiah’s expansive invitation is—do we still need to hear it? Have we really accepted it, or are we no different than the Israelites? In this country, it’s very easy to be a Christian, and that means there are a lot of folks who are outwardly Christian for all the wrong reasons, with no inward reality, no real faith in Christ. The church has to shoulder a lot of the blame for that, of course, because there are a lot of churches in this country that don’t give people God’s invitation, that don’t challenge people with the call of the gospel; it’s easier not to, after all, easier just to give people what they already know they want to hear. Even for the church, it’s easier to serve junk food.
Despite all this, underneath and through it all, God’s invitation still goes out: “Come, all of you who hunger and thirst; come to me, that you may live.” And we need to ask ourselves: have we really done that, are we really living in God? Or do we still need to accept it?
(Excerpted, edited, from “The Invitation”)
Photo: Elakala Waterfall 1. © 2006 ForestWander (http://www.ForestWander.com). License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States.
Jesus victorious
Atheists often talk about “the problem of evil” as though it were primarily an intellectual issue requiring an explanation, and then they ding God for not providing an explanation they deem adequate. The truth is, though, the philosophical problem of evil is secondary—the real problem is much more basic: what are we going to do about it? God doesn’t offer us an explanation for evil, but that doesn’t mean he has no answer for it. Jesus is God’s answer to the problem of the evil and sin in this world; in him, God gave us, not the answer we thought we wanted, but the answer we actually needed: he offered us himself. He came down to live our life, to identify with us, to endure the darkness of our fallen world with us, and to defeat that darkness, not with its own weapons, but with light.
When people ask, “Where’s God when it hurts—in the tragedies we see so often, and the large-scale injustices of this world?” they often assume the answer must be “Nowhere”; after all, if there really is a God out there, and he actually heard our suffering, wouldn’t he do something about it? But the truth is, as Easter shows us, God has heard our suffering—he has heard every cry of anguish, felt every blow and every betrayal, and caught every tear in the palm of his hand—and in Jesus Christ, he has done everything about it.Read more
The relentless faithfulness of God
“The former things I declared of old;
they went out from my mouth, and I announced them;
then suddenly I did them, and they came to pass.
Because I know that you are obstinate,
and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead brass,
I declared them to you from of old, before they came to pass I announced them to you,
lest you should say, ‘My idol did them,
my carved image and my metal image commanded them.’
“You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it?
From this time forth I announce to you new things,
hidden things that you have not known.
They are created now, not long ago;
before today you have never heard of them, lest you should say, ‘Behold, I knew them.’
You have never heard, you have never known, from of old your ear has not been opened.
For I knew that you would surely deal treacherously,
and that from before birth you were called a rebel.
“For my name’s sake I defer my anger,
for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,
that I may not cut you off.
Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another.
—Isaiah 48:3-11 (ESV)
Israel had a long history of faithlessness to God—it’s what got them taken off into exile—but despite all that, he refused to give up on them. He reminds his people of the many times in the past that he had told them what would happen, and then brought about what he predicted; and look at verses 4-5. Why did he do this? “Because I knew how stubborn you are”! If God had simply done good things for them, would they have given him the credit? No, they would have given the credit as they saw fit, to the idols they themselves had made. God told them what he was going to do before he did it so that they would know who was truly responsible. They could always refuse to admit that knowledge—and sometimes they did; that’s why God has to say, “You’ve heard these things. Won’t you admit them?”—but they would have no excuse and no justification for their refusal.Read more
The Parable of the Three Little Pigs
(This isn’t part of the sermon proper for September 8, but I read it just before the sermon; I originally wrote it back in 2007.)
The day of the Lord is like three little pigs who went out into the world to make their fortunes. Knowing the stories, they traveled until they found a place where no wolf had been seen for hundreds of years; then they settled down to build homes and earn their living.
The first pig just wanted to enjoy life, so he wasn’t interested in spending too much time building his house. “What’s the fastest way to get my house built?” he asked himself, and quickly settled on a straw house with no real foundation. In a short time, his house was finished; it was a little flimsy, but that didn’t bother him—he was rarely there, except to sleep.
The second pig sniffed with disapproval when he saw the first pig’s house of straw. “That’s simply not appropriate,” he said to himself. “Granted, there’s no need to go overboard—you shouldn’t take your house too seriously—but it’s important to have a nice, solid, respectable house, as befits a nice, solid, respectable member of society.” So the second pig built himself a house of wood, with which he was very pleased. “It’s no flimsy, disreputable shack like the first pig built, nor is it overbuilt like the third pig’s house; it’s just a good, practical house, enough and not too much.”
The third pig, meanwhile, wanted to build the best house he possibly could; he made sure he had the best possible foundation, then built his house of solid stone—top-quality granite, in fact—doing everything he could to ensure that his house would stand no matter what happened. He knew the other two pigs thought he was taking this whole house-building thing much too seriously, but he didn’t care; he wanted a house worthy of honor.
The three little pigs lived for some years in contentment, each pleased with the choices he had made, until one day a great wildfire swept unexpectedly through the area. The first little pig ran to his house of straw to save his valuables; but while he was in the house, the fire swept over it and it immediately burned to the ground, killing the little pig. The second little pig ran to his house of wood to save his valuables; but while he was in the house, the fire swept over it and it began to burn. The little pig dropped everything and ran; he escaped alive, but with everything he owned lost in the fire. He ran to the house of stone, where the third little pig let him in; while they were in the house, the fire swept over it—and passed on by. The house was scorched by the flames and smelled of fire and smoke, but was otherwise undamaged, because stone doesn’t burn.
For those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
(1 Corinthians 3:10-20, 6:19-20)
Photo ©2012 Daniel Case. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Nitric grace
The gospel of grace is a universal acid that dissolves all the pretensions, presuppositions and preferences of this world order. If you’re not feeling it burn, you’re probably not preaching Jesus.
Credit and thanks
A couple weeks ago I put up a post called “God is in the real,” talking about a lesson God had been bringing home to me that week; it was a point I had seen made somewhere before, but I could not for the life of me remember where. Yesterday afternoon, my lovely wife was good enough to point me back to the original post, and indeed, the author there put it much better than I did. I’m not posting an excerpt out of respect for her posted request, but I encourage you to click through and read it, as it’s well worth your time.
Impertinent question of the month
When people find out my wife and I have just had a son after three daughters, most of the time we get some form of the same basic reaction: “Oh, so you kept trying until you had a boy, huh?” In a lot of cases, I suspect it’s people trying to make sense on their own terms of the fact that yes, we just intentionally had a fourth child—they can’t imagine themselves doing such a thing, except perhaps with some particular and significant provocation. In a sense, it’s not completely false; as it happens, we picked out a boy’s name years and years ago, and we rather felt that it would be sad if we never met the person to whom the name belonged. Aside from that, though, we would have been just as happy with a fourth girl. The gender isn’t the point.
I don’t want this to come across wrong, because I believe male/female differences are real and important and valuable; I believe the reality of our two sexes, and the deeper and more profound reality of gender of which our biological sexes are a concrete instantiation, matters more than we know. But my children are not abstractions, they are not generalities, they are not case studies—they are themselves. They are particular specific people, and the fact that three of them are girls and one is a boy is very much part of that, but it’s only part of who they are as whole people, and I wanted them for themselves.
Yes, they are created in the image of God, male and female, as are their mother and I; but that’s not all that defines them. They are creators and destroyers; they are accomplished sinners and saints in training; they are capable of genius and prone to folly; and so am I all of those things as well, and heaven help all of us as I try my best to do my part to raise them to be better and more faithful and more loving disciples and friends of Jesus than I am. Trying for a boy? No, as well say we were trying for a pianist (though judging by his infant fingers, we might have managed that); we were trying to welcome the child God intended to give us in trust, as his stewards, to raise in his name and for his glory, to join the others whom he had already given us in the same way. It’s not about us or what we want at all, it’s about him.
Though I will say, it’s nice to have a baby sleeping on my shoulder again.