Category Archives: Scripture

In defense of the church, part VI: We need each other

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Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

—Hebrews 10:19-25 (ESV)

On a nobler and more elevated note than the previous post . . .

I started doing this series over a year ago now, carried on for a while, and then some time last August, had my attention fixed firmly enough in another direction that I forgot completely about it.  (Gee, I wonder what could have done that?)  I don’t want to just let it go, though, because this is too important for that.

I’ve talked about various aspects of the church—the value of preaching, the realistic necessity of the institution, and so on—and about the fact that Jesus loves the church, whether we like it or not; I think it also needs to be said, as the authors of Hebrews do, that whether we like the church or not, we need it.  If we’re going to be faithful disciples of Christ, we need to be a part of the church, and we need to be involved.

Part of this is that, as David Wood argues, we need spiritual friendship in order to live as Christ calls us to live.  Not even Jesus tried to live the godly life on his own—he surrounded himself with good friends who went with him everywhere.  The Rev. Wood makes this point in the course of talking about the pastoral life and pastoral excellence, but if it’s more critical for pastors, that’s only because we serve as leaders and exemplars for the church; this is necessary for pastors because it’s necessary for all Christians if we’re actually going to live as Christians.

This is how God wired us:  for friendship, relationship, community, to lean on each other and depend on each other to be strong where and when we ourselves are weak.  We need others who know us well enough that they can help us see ourselves more clearly and accurately than we can through our own eyes, and whom we can trust to rebuke and correct us when we’re going awry.  And let’s face it, resisting temptation is a lot less fun in the moment than giving in to it; we need people whose company we enjoy with whom we can go find something else to do.  “Just say no” only works for so long—we need something better to which we can say “yes” instead.

This is well illustrated by an old story, which has been told in many variations, of a young man who was feeling spiritually dry and cold, and so went to see one of the great old saints of the church to seek advice.  He poured out his heart to the old saint, told him of his problem, and asked what he might do about the dryness and coldness of his spiritual life.  The old man didn’t say a word, but picked up the fireplace tongs and used them to reach into the fire and pluck out a coal, which he set on the hearth.  The coal immediately began to fade, first from bright cherry-red to dull red, to orange, and ultimately to black.  After a little while, the old saint leaned forward, picked up the coal with his hand, and tossed it back into the fire, where it was soon burning merrily once again.  The young man, with a thoughtful look on his face, thanked the old man and took his leave.

It’s not just about what we get out of being a part of the church, though—we also need the church for what we can give to it.  For our own growth, we need the opportunity to serve others as they serve us.  This helps us develop our gifts, stretching us to take risks and try new things.  More importantly, it draws us out of ourselves and teaches us to value and care for others.  We can’t become loving people without actually loving people—and the people who are the hardest to love are often the most important for us in that respect, for it’s in loving the unlovable that we come closest to Christ’s love for us.

Finally, of course, the fact that the church needs us matters in and of itself, too.  God calls us to serve him, and part of that is participating in and serving his body, his people, the church.  Yes, this means setting aside some of what we want; it means making compromises, and putting other people ahead of ourselves.  This too, of course, is part of our spiritual growth, but it’s also the recognition that the call of God on our lives isn’t just about us, about fulfilling our needs and giving us what we want—it’s also about others, and how we can be of use to bless them.

Now, I’m not so foolish as to think that this will necessarily come easily; I’m a pastor, I know better.  But what I said in the first post in this series still holds true:

I don’t stay in the church because I have found it to be a wonderful place and a wonderful experience; taken all in all, I’ve found it quite uneven. Rather, I stay in the church as an act of faith that God meant what he said when he called us his people, his family, his body, and promised that not even the gates of Hell would prevail against us—and I say that as one who knows full well that those gates threaten us from within as well as from without. However ambivalent I may sometimes be, it remains true through all that Jesus loves the church, and died for her, and that we are called to follow his lead.

All of which is to say, as much as I understand the stones people throw at the church (having fired off a few myself at times), I do believe the church needs to be defended; and I say that not because I’m in the business, of the guild, as it were, but rather despite that fact. However badly we screw it up, as we often do, this is still something God has ordained, and it’s still important that we gather together in worship and fellowship and ministry. Yes, that means friction, which is unpleasant; but that friction is one of the things God uses to sand away our rough edges and polish our strengths. True community—where, as Kurt Vonnegut beautifully said, “the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured”—is not an easy thing, which is why far too many churches don’t try all that hard to create it; but for all that, it’s important for our well-being, and if we will commit to it, it’s a beautiful gift of God.

The problematic blessings of God

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Thus says the Lord God:
“Behold, I will lift up my hand to the nations,
and raise my signal to the peoples;
and they shall bring your sons in their bosom,
and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders.
Kings shall be your foster fathers,
and their queens your nursing mothers.
With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you,
and lick the dust of your feet.
Then you will know that I am the Lord;
those who wait for me shall not be put to shame.”—Isaiah 49:22-23 (ESV)The Jews get a lot of flak from many Christians for their failure to understand what God was trying to do and thus to fulfill the part in his plan. Now, obviously someone who believes as I do that Jesus is the promised Messiah is going to have a different take on that than someone who doesn’t; but without getting into comparative theology, I think it needs to be said that we should all be a lot humbler about such arguments. Many of us (perhaps most of us) have an unfortunate tendency to present our positions as if their truth is obvious, and should be obvious to those who disagree with us—meaning, of course, that we’re the noble ones who have the truth, and our opponents must be arguing for ignoble reasons. This is not only wrongheaded, it’s wrong-spirited.What’s more, in some cases, it’s also evidence of our own lack of self-knowledge and self-awareness; and this would be one of those. Consider this section of Isaiah (which is representative of other passages in the prophets): God is proposing to bless his people by bringing in the nations to join them. In order to accept this blessing, they need to do two things: one, they have to give up their national self-understanding—what we might, by analogy to the present day, call “Israelite exceptionalism”—and two, they have to welcome the other peoples of the world in.Now, to be sure, God isn’t asking Israel to take a secondary place; quite the contrary, the nations will honor them and bow before them in recognition of how much they owe the people of Israel. That said, remember, the nations are outsiders, and some of them are bitter enemies; he’s asking them to welcome strangers, rivals, and people who have hurt them badly into their land and into their people.  He’s asking them not only to forgive their enemies, but to adopt their enemies, to welcome former enemies into their home, to love them, and to trust them as family.That’s a challenge, if we’re honest.  If we really put ourselves into the story, it’s not necessarily all that obvious that it really qualifies as a blessing.  After all, we’re used to thinking of blessings as being for us, while the blessing Isaiah promises here is as much for the nations as it is for Israel; God blesses Israel in part so that they may bless the nations.  To recognize this as a real blessing, we need to understand that this is what the blessings of God look like—they really never are just for us.  We aren’t merely recipients of his blessings, we’re conduits.  That’s just how God works.God’s blessings often aren’t easy to receive.  Grace isn’t easy.  Love isn’t easy.  They come with challenges, asking us to do things that we don’t necessarily want to do.  I would venture to say that anyone who takes them lightly, who isn’t made at least a little uncomfortable by the blessings of God, doesn’t understand them as well as they should.  I’m certainly not saying that we should encourage anyone not to accept the grace of God; but if we find anyone reluctant to do so, we should understand that their reluctance is not altogether unreasonable.  God’s blessings are always best for us . . . but they’re often not what we think is best for us, and so we have to give up our own ideas of what’s best in order to accept them.  Doing so is itself a blessing—but we should never make the mistake of thinking that it’s an easy and obvious step.

What our gaffes reveal about our character

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The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart
his mouth speaks.—Luke 6:45 (ESV)Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.”  It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter:  because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see.  They’re the places where the mask slips.  That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.The highest-profile gaffe of recent weeks, of course, is the president’s “Special Olympics” quip on The Tonight Show, which (much to the administration’s chagrin) turned out to be the rimshot heard ’round the world, despite the best efforts of his sycophants to wave it away as meaningless.  We know better than that, these days; we know gaffes are meaningful, and so by and large, we haven’t bought that line.  At the same time, though, what I haven’t seen is much thoughtful reflection on what Barack Obama’s gaffe does mean—most of the commentary has only been interested in its political significance (and on increasing or decreasing that significance, as it suits the one offering the comment).An exception to that is John Stackhouse’s recent post, probably because it’s not just about the president—it’s also a reflection on his own gaffes:

We have to cut each other a little slack: people under stress sometimes do inexplicable things, including making tasteless jokes or using inappropriate language.But I’m not inclined to let myself entirely off the hook, however forgiving I might feel toward President Obama or any other public figure. I recall the words of Jesus: “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).That joke came from somewhere. That word came from somewhere. . . .Yes, we live in a sarcastic and vulgar culture . . . It is part of the air we breathe and the toxins enter us whether we like them or not.Again, recognizing that kind of constant cultural influence should help me be more understanding and forgiving of others who screw up in public.Nonetheless, it is simply true that sometimes I really do mean what I say. Sigmund Freud was prone to overstatement, but there is more than a grain of truth in his dictum, “There is no such thing as a joke.” And as I search my heart for the attitudes expressed in this joke or that word choice, I confess I am sometimes dismayed at what I find. . . .Sometimes, alas, the way you really do think about things and the way you really do talk about things—that is, the way you think and talk when you think no one can hear or no one will be offended—really does come out in public.Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy.And may we attend to what we have inadvertently exposed in our gaffes. It’s good to get forgiveness. It’s better to get healed.

I believe we’re right to ask what the president’s wisecrack tells us about the abundance of his heart; but as we do so, we’d best not get too cocky; we’d best proceed with all due humility, and ask ourselves what we’d let slip about our own hearts if we were in his shoes.  And perhaps we’d also do well to bear in mind the counsel of the book of James:Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.—James 3:1 (ESV)

The gospel-driven church and politicized faith

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Hear this, O house of Jacob, who are called by the name of Israel,
and who came from the waters of Judah,
who swear by the name of the Lord and confess the God of Israel,
but not in truth or right.
For they call themselves after the holy city, and stay themselves on the God of Israel;
the Lord of hosts is his name.

—Isaiah 48:1-2 (ESV)

These descriptions mark the Israelites as God’s people:  he’s the one who chose them, he’s the one who named them, he’s the deity with whom their nation is identified and in whose name they take their oaths.  He is, we might say, the God of their civil religion, in the same way as our public officials and witnesses in our courts swear on the Bible and end their oaths of office with the words, “so help me God.”  But just as we have a lot of people who say those words and mean nothing by them, so Israel’s outward participation in the rituals of their faith said little for the reality of their beliefs; and so God says, “Though you call upon me and take oaths in my name, it’s neither in truth nor in righteousness.”  Their faith, he says, is false, because it’s not based in real knowledge of him nor does it produce any real willingness to live as he wants them to live.

This is a pretty strong charge.  In contemporary terms, he’s saying that the faith of the nation as a whole—not of everyone in it, of course, but of the nation as a whole—is nominal.  It’s a matter of outward show with no inward reality, of religious exercise without any real faith.  This wasn’t an issue which was unique to them, of course; if we want to be honest, looking around at the church in this country, we’d have to wonder if God would say much the same sort of thing to us, if Isaiah were alive in our day.  I think Michael Spencer would agree; though he doesn’t put it in the terms Isaiah uses, his indictment of American evangelicalism boils down to pretty much the same thing:  on the whole, we invoke the name of the God of Israel, but not in truth or righteousness.

Now, whatever disagreements I have with Spencer’s specific predictions, I think he’s identified a real problem in much of the American church; I think we need to realize that Isaiah’s words to Israel hit a lot closer to home than we might like to think.  It seems to me that verse 2 offers us something of a clue as to why.  At first glance, this might seem like an odd follow-up to verse 1; but consider the description of the people of Israel here:  “you who call yourselves citizens of the holy city and rely on the God of Israel.”  Here as in verse 1, God is identified as the God of Israel; and what does the prophet say in response:  “The LORD Almighty is his name.”

That’s subtle, but I think it’s a rebuke to the parochialism of Israel.  Their concern is only for themselves, and they see their God as just “an amiable local deity who exists to keep track of Israel’s interests,” as John Oswalt puts it.  Instead of seeing themselves as a nation formed by the only God of all time and space for the purpose of bringing all the nations to the worship of that God, they see themselves as a nation like any other nation, with a god like any other nation, out for their own best interests like any other nation; and since they’re a small nation, they must have a small god, and thus they keep running after the gods of the bigger, more powerful nations in hopes of improving their geopolitical standing.  What God wants them to see is that the nation ought to be only of secondary importance; he’s promised to return them to their homeland, yes, but not because their political independence or political power are of any significance whatsoever.  It is, rather, for his own sake, for the sake of his reputation and his glory.  What matters is God’s plan for the world, and their faithfulness to serve him by doing their part in it.

The Israelites didn’t get that, and didn’t particularly want to; and it seems to me that many American evangelicals, whatever they might say about what they believe, functionally don’t get this one either.  Spencer’s right that the evangelical involvement in American politics has gone wrong in some important ways, and I certainly agree that “believing in a cause more than a faith” is a bad thing; but while that has in some ways and in some cases been the effect of evangelical political involvement, I think the real error goes deeper.

The real problem here, I think, is that we’ve made our nation too important in our worldview and theology—to the point of idolatry, in many cases.  Many of us who consider ourselves Bible-believing Christians have the American flag in our sanctuaries and sing hymns to our country on patriotic holidays, and we never even stop to ask whether doing so honors and pleases God.  There may be a prima facie case for including such things in our Sunday worship—I don’t know, because I’ve never heard anyone try to make it.  It’s simply assumed.

I’m all for patriotism, in its place; I grew up in a Navy family and I’m proud of the fact, and one of the reasons I don’t support the Democratic Party is because I don’t believe they give this nation enough credit.  I don’t accuse Democrats of being unpatriotic, but I do think many of them are deficient in that respect.  But if I’m all for patriotism in its place, I firmly believe that’s second place, behind our allegiance to the kingdom of God; and I think it’s all too easy to mix them up, just as the people of Israel did.

This sort of mindset was evident, for example, in the predictions of many self-proclaimed prophets last fall that John McCain would defeat Barack Obama in November.  Why?  Because Sen. McCain’s policies were God’s policies and God was on Sen. McCain’s side, because Sen. McCain would be a better President for America and God’s on about blessing this country.  They missed the fact, as too many Christians in this country (and not just conservatives, either) miss the fact, that America is not God’s chosen nation.  The Puritan colonists of New England may have been trying to found a city on a hill that would lead the English church to reformation, but for all the many ways in which our presidents have appropriated such language to describe this country, and for all that many have agreed with de Tocqueville in describing America as “a nation with the soul of a church,” the USA is not the city on a hill that Jesus was talking about.  We are at best, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, God’s “almost-chosen people.”

To lose sight of this fact is to lose sight of the truth that we worship, not the God of America, but the Lord of the Universe and Creator of all time and space; it’s to come to see the Lord Almighty as functionally an amiable local deity who exists to keep track of America’s interests.  Granted, this doesn’t pose the same exact temptation as it did for Israel, since in our case, we are no small nation on the edges of power, but are rather one of the dominant powers of the earth; but it does skew our understanding of who God is and what he’s on about, and what we’re supposed to be on about.

When this happens, it results in the phenomenon that Spencer decries, not exactly because we’ve exchanged our faith for a cause, but rather because we’ve identified the kingdom of God in our minds and hearts with the nation of America.  It results in us coming to believe that we advance the kingdom of God in the ballot boxes, legislatures, courts, and executive offices of this nation, that our battle is in fact against flesh and blood and is to be fought with the weapons of flesh and blood; when that battle goes against us, the temptation is there to conclude (as I heard people conclude last November 5) that God has somehow failed and that his will has not been done.  Those sorts of reactions lead many outside the church to conclude that what American evangelicals really worship is our political agenda—a conclusion which should make us deeply uneasy.

None of this is to say that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics, that the evangelical political agenda (broadly understood) is substantively wrong, that evangelicals should become liberals or retreat from politics, or anything else of that sort.  But whether the substance of our participation is wrong or not, the spirit of our participation has been wrong in all too many cases, because—whether consequently or merely concurrently—we’ve lost the gospel focus to our faith.  We’ve treated our faith as a this-worldly thing—whether it’s “God’s politics” or “your best life now,” it’s all the same mistake at the core—and ended up with a religion defined in this-worldly terms, as a matter of “do this” and “don’t do that” in which success can be quantified in this-worldly categories.  In a word, we’ve ended up back in legalism; whether that legalism is focused on “thou shalt not,” on going out and doing good with Jesus as your role model, or on voting the right way and being politically active for the right causes, in the end, is only a difference in style.  And whatever legalism might be, what it clearly isn’t is Christian.

Again, I do believe that there are things we should do, and things we shouldn’t do, and causes we should support, and votes which are honoring to God and others which aren’t.  But none of those things is central to what the church is supposed to be, and none of them should be what we’re primarily about; none of them should be driving the bus.  As Jared Wilson has been arguing at length for some time now, the church needs to be “cross-centered, grace-laden, Christ-focused [and] gospel-driven”; to be faithful to our calling, that must be the core of who we are and the purpose of everything we do.  That should determine every aspect of our lives, in fact—which, yes, means that we should do certain things and not do other things, and certainly should shape our voting and our political involvement as it shapes everything else we do.  But we should always be bringing everything back to the gospel, not to a list of do’s and dont’s, much less a political platform or agenda; that and nothing else should be the touchstone for our lives and our decision-making.If our politics is secondary to and derivative of our faith, we’re doing it right.  If our faith is secondary to and derivative of our politics, we aren’t.

(The beginning of this post is excerpted from “The Stubborn Faithfulness of God”)

Living in Laodicea

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“And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen,
the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.“‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me
on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”—Revelation 3:14-22 (ESV)I laid out below (or attempted to lay out, anyway) my principal concern about the iMonk’s recent jeremiad (a term I use as a compliment, be it noted) in the Christian Science Monitor.  I agree with him that there are far too many churches in this country that aren’t about the gospel, that have given themselves over to the idolatry of causes (whether political, cultural, or otherwise), and are doing a poor job of teaching the gospel to their children (in part because most of the available curricula are terrible).  I even went so far as to say the other week that “too many churches are doing a better job of training future atheists than they are of training Christians.”  But to make blanket statements about “evangelicalism” as if that’s just the way evangelical churches are, which is what it seems to me Michael Spencer was doing (and, imho, too often does), strikes me as unfair; I know a lot of churches that aren’t like that, too.  For my part, I know I do an imperfect job, but I do my level best to preach the gospel, week in and week out, and to see to it that our teachers teach the gospel—and I’m just not that unusual.  Rather, I’m a lot more typical than a lot of the critics of evangelicalism realize.  (And I’ll tell you this, too:  even among those big-church-with-hip-worship-team pastors, in my experience, there are those who really do care about the gospel; as they’re struggling free of the attractional paradigm, a lot of them are doing so with a real sense of relief.)That said, if this were still mostly an intramural conversation among evangelicals, I’d still be less concerned; even if I think Spencer’s argument is overstated, I do recognize that overstatement has its uses for getting people’s attention (as Flannery O’Connor memorably argued).  What concerns me now with its appearance in the Christian Science Monitor is how it’s likely to be used, and the purposes for which it’s likely to be used:  to beat up on people, and to push political agendas.  That, I believe, will be truly unfortunate—and quite possibly, ironically enough, serve to worsen the very situation Spencer was aiming to address.  That bell can’t be unrung, of course, and we can’t control what people outside the church will make of or do with his argument; but there’s one thing we can do, which is the one thing we need to do anyway:  rather than pointing fingers (whether at the iMonk, or at those whom he critiques, or at the media, or anyone else), we can stop, open our hearts, and examine ourselves.We have a model for this, as Jared Wilson pointed out earlier today, in Ray Ortlund, who responded to Spencer’s piece with a moving and thought-provoking meditation on this passage from Revelation, the letter to the church in Laodicea:

This was the church in Laodicea. This is too many churches today. We focus on our strengths and successes. And there is just enough good going on in our ministries that we can plausibly refuse a blunt reappraisal of our weaknesses. But the Lord is saying, “That whole mentality is wrong. It is lukewarm. It makes me want to vomit (verse 16). . .  I am confronting you that you don’t love me wholeheartedly, so that you go into repentance and reevaluation and change. Here’s what you need to do: Stop telling yourself you’re okay and go back into re-conversion (verse 18). Change your complacency into zealous repentance (verse 19). Hey, are you listening to me? I’m that faint voice you can barely hear any more. I’m outside your church, banging on your door. You didn’t even notice when I walked out. But I’m back, one more time. If anyone in there is listening, just open the door and I will come in. I won’t smack you down. I will befriend you (verse 20). The others in your church may or may not join us, but all I’m asking for is one open, honest heart.”Usually, our churches settle for half-way remedies, which is why they limp along in mediocrity. But every now and then, someone humbly opens that door, and Jesus walks in. He is ready to bless any church if anyone there is willing to start admitting, “I am not rich, I have not prospered, and I need everything.”

The path to life doesn’t begin with gathering political power and influence, or with building up money and possessions and prestige; it begins with that humble admission that those things aren’t really what matters, and that in truth, we really do need everything from Jesus.  May God humble our pride that we may truly depend on his grace.

The rights of the Author

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Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb:
“I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens,
who spread out the earth by myself.”—Isaiah 44:24 (ESV)For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!—Psalm 139:13-17 (ESV)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 write, but also because at any given point I might make a mistake, while God never does. 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 in comparison to him there is no other power. He is the great Author of everyone and everything else that exists; there is no one and nothing capable of rising off the page and wresting the pen from his hand.This includes the fact that 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.(Excerpted, edited, from “God’s Mysterious Way”)

Does God hide?

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Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.—Isaiah 45:13 (ESV)What are we supposed to make of this statement?  What does it mean?  It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect there are three truths in view here. First, God could be said to hide himself in that he’s often not to be found where we look for him, in the ways in which we expect to find him.  God is not to be found in our conventional wisdom; he doesn’t do things in the ways that we expect, according to what makes sense to us, because he isn’t limited by our knowledge and understanding. That’s why the gifts he gives aren’t limited by our knowledge and understanding, either; that’s why he kept trying to give Israel something so much bigger than they wanted—he kept trying to give them the gift of being the ones through whom he would redeem the nations, when they just wanted him to help them conquer the nations. That’s why the late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins spoke truth when he said, “If you want a religion that makes sense, go somewhere else. But if you want a religion that makes life, choose Christianity.” So often, the problem is that we’re looking for a god who makes sense to us on our terms; it’s not really that God is hiding from us, but that our expectations and assumptions are blocking our eyes and ears.What this means, in practice, is that God is not found by those who are unwilling to find him; he isn’t found by the proud and the haughty, by those who have all the answers, by those who are confident in their own strength to conquer life on their own terms. He isn’t found by those who aren’t really seeking him, who aren’t willing to surrender their lives to him; he isn’t found by the assertive and the self-sufficient. God is found by the humble and the contrite, by those who know they need him.This is why it’s said at times that he hides his face from Israel in judgment—Israel knows he’s there, not because they sought him and found him but because someone else did, but too often, they aren’t really seeking him at all, they’re only seeking his benefits. They want him to give them what they want while they disregard his commands, and so he hides his face from them, he turns away and leaves them in the silence until they will humble themselves and truly seek, not their own best interest, but his face.There’s another aspect to this as well, that in the ancient world, all the other gods had their statues; only the God of Israel, as far as I know, went without physical images for his people to worship. The nations around Israel expected to be able to walk into a temple and see the god—but in this, too, the Lord was (and is) a God who hides. This might seem like a minor point, but in truth it’s quite the opposite. The gods of the world can be represented, can be seen; the one true God can’t. In theological terms, he is transcendent—he’s so far above and beyond us that, as he tells Moses in Exodus 33, no frail, sinful human being can see him and survive the experience. He is too bright to see:  he is “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” That’s why the poet Henry Vaughan, in one of his finest moments, wrote, “There is in God—some say—a deep but dazzling darkness.”  God’s light is so bright that it overwhelms our ability to perceive it, and becomes to us instead the deepest of darkness. He is too bright, too big, too great, to be seen.And here, then, is the wonder, and here is the miracle: this God who was hidden from us in unapproachable light, this God whom no one could see and live, crossed that divide in his own power and revealed himself to us as Jesus Christ. This God who forbade us to make any image of him, who would not allow us to imagine our own version of him, gave us more than just an image of himself—he gave us himself, becoming fully human and living a full human life.When we talk about Jesus coming, we tend to focus on his death and resurrection—especially in this season of Lent—and there’s certainly good reason for that; and we focus too on all the things he taught, and that’s also completely appropriate. But I think we lose sight, sometimes, of the fact that those aren’t the only reasons he came; and that one of the reasons he came is simply that we might know him in a new way and be able to relate to him more closely. God will always be beyond our ability to fully understand, certainly and there will always be times when his face seems hidden to us. That’s just the way it is in this broken, sin-haunted, pain-darkened world of ours. But at the same time, even as it remains true that no one in this world has ever seen God in all his glory, yet it’s no longer true that no one has ever seen God: for as John 1:18 says, God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, has made him known. The divide we could never cross, he crossed for us, out of love for us; in Jesus, the hidden face of God has been forever revealed.(Excerpted, edited, from “A God Who Hides?”)

“God is right; the rest of us are just guessing.”

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The late, great Rich Mullins on Psalm 137, from a concert in Texas shortly before his death:

It starts out: “By the waters of Babylon we lay down and wept when we remembered thee Zion, for our captors required of us songs, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’ But how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Which is a good question because what land have we ever been in that wasn’t foreign?It starts out so beautifully and then at the end of that psalm, the last verse of that psalm is, “How very blessed is the man who dashes their little ones’ heads against the rocks.” This is not the sort of scripture you read at a pro-life meeting. But it’s in there nonetheless.Which is the thing about the Bible . . . that’s why it always cracks me up when people say, “Well, in du du du du du du du duh, it says . . .” You kinda go, “Wow! It says a lot of things in there!” Proof-texting is a very, very dangerous thing. I think if we were given the Scriptures, it was not so that we could prove that we were right about everything. If we were given the Scriptures, it was to humble us into realizing that God is right and the rest of us are just guessing.

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”)

No other redeemer

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“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “and my servant whom I have chosen,
that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.
Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.
I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior.”—Isaiah 43:10-11 (ESV)Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among humanity
by which we must be saved.”—Acts 4:8-12 (ESV, alt.)This is the church’s message, it’s the word God has given us:  there is no other god in heaven and no other redeemer on this earth; there is no other name in heaven or on earth or under the earth by which anyone may be saved. There is no one else in whom we can put our hope and faith and trust. There is no other. Period, full stop, end of sentence.  That’s our message, to each other and to the world—and make no mistake, we always need to begin by reminding ourselves of that, because it’s so easy to get off into putting our trust in other things. We always need to make sure that we’re really living in the good news ourselves before we try to share it with others.It can be difficult to keep that focus, whether in hard times or in easy ones; but I do think that hard times like the ones we’re experiencing now are particularly opportune times to preach this good news.  Anyone who reads the headlines and watches the news has figured out something they might not have figured out before: they’ve come to the realization that the economy isn’t going to save them. Their jobs, their resumés, their paychecks, aren’t going to save them. The banks aren’t going to save them, and if they have any investments, those aren’t going to save them either.They’ve figured out that Congress isn’t going to save them; and judging by the opinion polls, folks are starting to figure out that the president isn’t going to save them either. With some of the rhetoric that got thrown around last year, I think a lot of people really believed we’d elected a new messiah; I think it’s starting to register that all we did was all we ever do, which is elect another politician. Which is something we should also remember two years from now, and four years from now—even if we end up with a new president and a whole new Congress, they aren’t going to save us either.  Regardless of party, politicians are still politicians—even the best of them.What’s more, we aren’t going to save ourselves. Our plans won’t save us. Our possessions won’t save us. Our big ideas won’t save us, and neither will our little ones. Our inspirations won’t save us, and our inventions won’t do the trick either, even if we can come up with any. All these are good things, and necessary; none of them are enough, even if we put them all together. We cannot save ourselves, and we cannot save each other; and none of the things we value can save us either. There is only one Savior, and he is Jesus Christ the Son of the Living God; there is only one God who redeems, and there is hope for the future—and for the present, for that matter—in nothing and no one else. This is the message God has given us for the world; our call is to share it freely.Interestingly, the importance of this was made clear recently by the great stage magician and avowed atheist Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller.  I agree wholeheartedly with what the Anchoress had to say when she posted this clip last December:

With some understandable reservation, I have always liked Penn Jillette. Intelligence sizzles off of him the way I imagine it did with John Quincy Adams. He is articulate, urbane, insightful, mischievous and acerbically funny, and he manages to be all of those things without going into the condescension, dismissiveness and arrogance that some (think: Bill Maher) latch onto in college and extend into a sort of perpetually adolescent sneer-and-kneejerk.He is also, clearly, a guy who thinks—you cannot come up with an act like Penn & Teller with a closed mind—and, perhaps because his schtick is all about illusion and unreality, one gets the impression that Penn Jillette does work to keep the world around him, and himself, “real” by his own lights.So it is interesting, and moving, to watch this gifted man struggle to bring words and context to something that surprised him—to keep things as “real” as he can, while engaged in mild (but also real) wonder and awe.I like this video because it is a rare thing to see any man or woman expose themselves in this way—in a way that says, “I had a wow-experience and I am not afraid to tell you about it, even though half of you may say I’m a sentimental chump and the other half of you will say I’m hell-bound chum.” I like it because even though he resolutely insists that he’s still a good atheist, he is not too proud to say he was moved by a “good man” who believes very differently. I like it because he is not afraid of a fight, or to show us a moment where his intellect and his heart are engaged in a bit of a tussle.That’s courageous. It’s rare. Left or right, believer or atheist, it’s rare, and so I admire it.There is a message to Christians, here; two, actually. The first is passive: make note of the fact that it was a gentle Christian who was willing to accept Jillette where he was, as he was, with openness and a positive mien, who was able to touch him. Aggressiveness and negativity won’t get you there, which is why Christ eschewed it.The second message is as far from passive as you can get, and it comes from Jillette himself: “How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible, and not tell them that?”

Penn’s right. If we really believe this, we need to act like it.(Excerpted, edited, from “No Other Redeemer”)