Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Only Answer

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(Habakkuk 1:2-4, 1:12-2:4; Matthew 28:1-10)

Talking with Aaron last week down at 1000 Park, I commented on the price of coffee; in response, he noted that it’s expensive right now in part because of natural disasters in coffee-growing areas. Most recently, there was the eruption of Mt. Merapi in Java last October and November, combined with an earthquake off Sumatra that spawned a tsunami. Between the two events, hundreds of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands were evacuated; the coffee crop was far from the greatest loss. It only makes things worse that this was just the latest in five-plus years of disasters for Indonesia, beginning with the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami in 2004. That one is estimated to have been the third-largest earthquake, and the fifth-deadliest, in recorded history.

It’s not just Indonesia, though; doesn’t it seem like we’ve had an awful lot of major natural disasters in recent years? We no doubt tend to overestimate our own experience, but there’s some reason to think so; of the 25 earthquakes I know of that are believed to have been of magnitude 8.5 or greater, five have struck since Christmas, 2004. Add in the Haitian earthquake of January, 2010—which was “only” magnitude 7.0 but one of the deadliest in history—the upsurge in hurricanes that has given us storms like Katrina, and volcanoes like Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and it’s been a rough time for our poor planet. What’s more, human action often makes these things worse, as we saw with Katrina, and most recently in Japan, where the natural disaster of earthquake and tsunami set off a very human disaster in the nuclear power plants in Fukushima Prefecture.

Equally part of the pattern is the human impulse to turn someone else’s disaster to our own advantage; it’s Rahm Emanuel’s advice: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Mostly that seems to be political in nature; but when there was no obvious political gain to be had, with the Boxing Day tsunami, the responses were theological. This was especially true from atheists such as Britain’s Martin Kettle, who wrote a column titled “God and the Tsunami” which concluded with the question, “Are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?” Later, novelist James Wood wrote, “If there is a God with whom we can communicate, who (sometimes) hears our prayers, why does He not hear our suffering? Or why does He hear our suffering and do nothing about it? Theology has no answer, and never has had.”

It’s exasperating; as my colleague and friend Jim Berkley noted at the time, it seemed that the secular press had all of a sudden discovered the problem of evil—and assumed that the discovery was equally sudden for the church. Actually, they were the ones who were late to the discussion, and asking the wrong question. They wanted an explanation for the disaster—as, I admit, a great many Christians did as well; as a result, they fell into the trap identified decades ago by H. L. Mencken when he wrote, “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.”

The truth is, we can’t find a satisfactory explanation for such things as the Boxing Day tsunami, or the abuse of a child, or the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or any of the other myriad ways in which human and natural evil devastate lives—there just isn’t one out there; and that should lead us to ask whether an explanation is really what we want. After all, let’s suppose that someone came along and offered an explanation of evil which really was sufficient, which really did explain everything in a satisfactory way, with no holes in it. What would be the cost of such an explanation? What would that mean? It would mean that evil is explainable, and thus that evil makes sense.

And for that to be the case, evil would have to belong in this world—there would have to be a proper place for it. For us to be able to explain why evil happens, evil would have to fit in with the way things are supposed to work; it would have to be somehow necessary to the proper order of things, which would mean that God deliberately created this world flawed from the beginning. If that were so, we would never be able to get away from evil; evil would be as eternal as good, because good would not be able to exist without it. That would be far too high a price to pay for any mere explanation.

Truth is, we could either have a world in which we can find a rational answer to the problem of evil, or a world in which the final defeat and total destruction of evil is a possibility; and it is the consistent testimony of Scripture that the latter is the world we have. Scripture doesn’t explain evil, because it offers no compromise with evil at all, only unrelenting denunciation of evil in all its forms. Trying to make sense of evil is futile, because evil doesn’t make sense. It can’t be rationally explained, because it doesn’t belong to the world God made; it’s fundamentally alien to the way things are supposed to be, and so it’s fundamentally inexplicable.

Does this mean that our faith has no answer to the problem of evil? Does this mean that God has no answer? No; he offers us the only answer possible: he offers us himself. Thus when Habakkuk complains about the evil God allows, what is God’s response? “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and it does not lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. . . . The righteous live by their faith.” The apostle Paul picks this up in Romans 1:17, applying it to the gospel of Jesus Christ: it is through Jesus, by faith in Jesus, that the righteous live by faith. It’s faith in a God who doesn’t fob us off with explanations, as if such thin soup would really make our lives any easier or any better, but instead comes down to bear evil with us, and ultimately to defeat it by his death and resurrection.

This is what Easter is about; this is God’s answer to evil. He doesn’t explain it, for to explain it would be to dignify it, to give a reason for it, and ultimately to excuse it, when evil is utterly inexcusable. Instead, he says, “I have overcome it.” He takes it on himself, paying the price for all of it and thus taking away the claim of evil on our lives; and then, when evil has done its worst, he undoes all of it, exposing its ultimate futility by rising again from the dead, unbeaten, unbroken, uncorrupted, undiminished. Evil takes its best shot, it does the most and the worst it can possibly do, and accomplishes . . . nothing. Indeed, it accomplishes worse than nothing, because it undoes itself; as John Piper put it, “God did not just overcome evil at the cross. He made evil serve the overcoming of evil. He made evil commit suicide.”

In the resurrection of Jesus, life has defeated death, and love has broken the power of sin, once and for all. Yes, there are still times when the pain of this world drives us to cry out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?”; at times we wonder why God is waiting so long to raise the curtain. But we know that at the cross, he turned evil against itself, and on that first Easter, he broke it; and when the time is right, he will complete the victory he won that day. Evil will be banished, and all things will be made new; God will live among us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, for death itself shall die, and grief and sorrow and pain will be no more. This is the promise, and the one who makes it is the beginning and the end, and all that he says is trustworthy and true. This is the meaning of Easter; this is why we celebrate this day; for the day of resurrection is the victory that has secured the promise.

 

Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, woodblock print, 1830-33.

Simon the Disciple

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God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay pots, to show that this all-surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. At all times and in every way, we are hard-pressed, but not crushed; at a loss, but not lost; hounded by enemies, but not deserted by God; thrown down, but not shattered. We are always carrying around in our bodies the killing of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for the sake of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
So death is at work in us, but life in you.

—2 Corinthians 4:6-12

Thus writes the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 4, sounding one of his central themes: we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, which means that when we suffer—not for sin, but for other reasons—we are somehow suffering with Christ; and more, that suffering with Christ is part of the way God works in us and uses us.

We have been given an incalculable treasure; we have been given new light by which to live, the light which is the knowledge of who God is and what he is like, which has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. But receiving that treasure hasn’t immediately made us perfect and perfectly beautiful; the light is brilliant and glorious, but we’re still just drab, workaday clay pots, cheap, easily broken, not worth repairing, common as the day is long. Sometimes, that’s intensely frustrating, and sometimes it seems to make no sense; but when we start to imagine ourselves more than that, we start to think that the beauty is really ours, not God’s, and we start to take the credit for it ourselves—and we don’t let his light shine through. Put a light in a whole, unbroken pot and put the lid on, and no light escapes; but if the pot is cracked, then the light can shine through.

And we are cracked, and life keeps cracking us. None of us here, I think, can come close to the catalogue of Paul’s trials, but we all suffer; and while some of it we know comes to us as the consequences of our own sin, there is much that we do not deserve. We suffer because we aren’t properly appreciated, because we don’t get the credit for what we do, because we make a convenient scapegoat, because things simply go wrong and we lack the money or the influence to fix them; we suffer because we’re too honest to pass the blame when the fault is ours, or because we take the blame in order to protect someone else, or because we keep our commitments when everything is going wrong or when others have broken faith with us, rather than seeking a loophole and getting out. We all know times when we are hard-pressed, when we are at a loss; some of us at least have known what it is to be persecuted by another, and most of us have felt the pain of being thoroughly defeated. We are cracked pots, and no mistake.

And through those cracks, the light of God shines, and within us, his power holds us together; and so though life presses us hard indeed, he bears us up under the pressure, and he makes a way out in his time. Though we are all too often bewildered, unsure, at a loss, we are never truly lost; we may not know where the next step is, but God does, and he’ll guide us, one step at a time. We may indeed find enemies hounding us, for who knows what reason, but even then, God is with us—we are not left alone; and though we are sometimes thrown down, we don’t shatter on the ground, because God keeps us in one piece, and so we bounce back.

And in that, we come to understand a little more, from the inside, what Jesus suffered for us—and as others see God bring us through the suffering that comes in this life, they come to understand that a little more, too, and they see his light shining in us. As people see the dying of Christ reflected in us, they can also see the life which overcomes and has overcome death, his resurrection life. We bear witness that we can in fact gain life by giving it away, that we can receive life by letting go of it, that we can find joy and peace even in the midst of pain and hardship, and that we have in truth been given a life which overcomes even death itself; and in so doing, we point people to Jesus, in whom they too can find life, eternal and overflowing.

In a sense, wherever else we might find ourselves in the story of the crucifixion, we are all Simon of Cyrene: called to carry his cross, and to find in that our witness to Jesus and our ministry to this world.

Only the Dead Rise

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(Isaiah 52:13-15; John 12:20-32)

If you look up the page in John at the first part of this chapter, you’ll see Jesus enter Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, what’s commonly called his triumphal entry. It is, it seems safe to say, the high point of his fame in his earthly ministry. He rides into the capital city on a donkey, like the king prophesied in Zechariah 9; the crowds are shouting phrases from Psalm 118, which is a triumph psalm, celebrating the return of the king of Israel to Jerusalem after a glorious battle. It is of course a psalm of praise to God for giving his people victory, but there is great honor in that for the king through whom God worked to bring it about; thus the king’s procession through the streets is a triumph, accompanied with the waving of palm branches, which were a symbol of victory. The crowds that day were welcoming Jesus as a conquering hero, as the heir of David reclaiming his throne to restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations. The Pharisees were in despair at the popular reaction, declaiming theatrically, “This is getting us nowhere. Look, the whole world has gone after him!”

Now, from their point of view, that was hyperbole; their concern isn’t for the whole world, but only for a few thousand Jews. But John knows very differently, and so he skips over the cleansing of the temple—he’s already mentioned the first time anyway, back in chapter 2; instead, immediately following the Pharisees’ melodramatic lament, we get this: “There were some Greeks who were there to worship God, to celebrate the Passover, and they kept asking to see Jesus.” The Pharisees don’t really care about the world beyond Israel except as it affects the Jews, but Jesus is different, and here we actually have the world, non-Jews (though clearly non-Jews who worshiped God) coming to Jesus. Somehow or other they get connected to Philip; Philip, predictably uncertain, grabs Andrew for advice, and Andrew, equally predictably, goes to tell Jesus.

Now, I imagine these Greeks trailing along behind Philip and Andrew—that’s how these things usually work, after all—but John doesn’t say; and indeed, the Greeks are never mentioned again, as Jesus doesn’t directly address them or even refer to them. Instead, he takes their arrival as a sign: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Which sounds completely, ludicrously obvious. Jesus has just been glorified—the donkey, the palm branches, the crowds yelling “Hosanna! Blessed is the coming king! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”—it’s already happening. I’m sure the disciples’ split-second reaction was simple agreement.

And then, as he so often does, Jesus turns everything inside out. He says “glorified,” and they’re thinking, glorified—power, success, honor, fame, the priests and Pharisees worshiping Jesus, the Romans out—maybe even a place to live, no more of all that walking around; but what does he mean by “glorified”? Try this: “I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” I’m telling you, hold your ear close to the page and you can practically hear the disciples’ jaws hit the ground and bounce. Glory equals death? Where did that come from? Sure, many cultures have believed firmly in the possibility of earning glory through death in battle, but that’s clearly not at all what Jesus is talking about; his idea of glory is a long way outside the norm.

Which is precisely why this little parable is so important. This world ties glory to self-assertion, to conquest, to pride, to being better than others, and so the gods we make in our own image do just the same; our view of who we are and of what we should pursue frames and shapes our understanding of who God is and what he wants from us. Jesus shows us that God isn’t like that—that in fact, God is on about something profoundly different. Life as we know it isn’t as we know it; there’s something much bigger going on, calling us to a very different way of living.

In particular, human religion has a “do this, not that” model of the human relationship with the divine. Different religions do it very, very differently, but the basic idea is the same: god tells us to do certain things and not do other things and to behave in particular ways so that he’ll be pleased with us, while we ask god to do certain things and not do other things so that we’ll be happy with him. What the reasons are for what god says, what the justifications are for what we can ask and when, and the balance between them are different with every religion, but in the end, that dance of mutual obligation is the structure of every human religion.

That is not the gospel, and it’s not what Jesus is on about. His purpose is to give us true life, and he doesn’t seek to do that by giving us a list of dos and don’ts; instead, he declares that he will do it by direct donation. He will die, he will let go of his life, so that he can give it to us. Thus his death will be his glory, for it will be through his death that he will win his victory: the defeat of death itself.

And in so doing, in giving us his life, he shows us what it means to live his life, and he gives us the example to follow; this is not simply the way he wins the victory, but it’s also the way we win the victory in his name. Thus Jesus declares, “Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” As you may remember, we’ve talked before about the way the Bible uses love/hate language to express absolute contrasts; Jesus isn’t advocating suicide, he’s talking about what is and should be our first love. He wants us to love him so much that if following him means giving up our own life—whether symbolically, letting go of the things we enjoy most in this world, or literally dying in his service—that we’ll do so, and gladly. To love Jesus in that way is to find eternal life. To love our own lives more than Jesus is to miss his life, and ultimately to lose everything that matters most.

The fact of the matter is, if we love our own lives most, we end up living to avoid death; we end up, indeed, very like this grain of wheat I hold in my hand. We clutch everything tightly to ourselves, and in the process make ourselves small, and hard, and narrow, with all our potential for life locked tightly inside for fear of losing it. If we will not give up our lives, time will yet take them by force in the end, crushing us into powder and leaving nothing that abides. But if we follow Jesus who did not clutch hard to his status and prerogatives as God, but who let everything go and accepted death in order that he might give us his life—if we let go of our lives and follow wherever he may lead, even if that means accepting death as he did—then we sow them into the ground where God can use them to bring forth much fruit.

And in so doing, we prepare ourselves to receive his greatest gift. God promises that we will experience his life in this world, but only in part; his greatest promise is that if we die with Jesus, we will also be raised from the dead with him, resurrected to eternal life in Christ. Those who love life above all, those who would avoid death, end by likewise avoiding resurrection, because resurrection is only possible through death. Letting go makes the promise possible, our surrender opens the door to victory, for as sure as the sunrise can only come after the night, this is true: it is only the dead who can ever rise.

Ready for the Sun

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(Malachi 3:13-4:6; Luke 1:57-80)

These last sections of Malachi—the last block of God’s argument with his people, and then a few verses of epilogue—tie the book and its themes together, but they work a bit differently than we’ve seen in Malachi to this point. To understand what’s going on here, we need to take a look back. If you were here when we started this, you probably remember that the book begins with God declaring his love for his people in the face of their skepticism. He reasserts that he has chosen Israel, the descendants of Jacob; but they’re doubtful, and we see the expression and results of their doubt all through Malachi. We see their stinginess with God, both in their inadequate sacrifices and in their failure to tithe; we see as well their unwillingness to commit to following him faithfully, which is revealed and reflected in their faithlessness in marriage.

And perhaps most of all, we see their complaints that God is not demonstrating his love for them the way they think he should. A couple weeks ago, we saw the accusation that the God of justice was absent, or had maybe even converted to injustice and decided to favor those who do evil. Here we see the logical conclusion to that: “Why should we serve God? What’s the point? We don’t get anything out of it—he doesn’t give us what we want.” Some of the doubters probably want to believe, but they’re struggling; others are most likely ready to give up; and you can be sure that some aren’t the least bit sincere, just cynically looking for any excuse to ignore God. Whatever their motives, though, this is where they land.

There are a few things to note about this. First off, you can see their focus: “what is the profit?” They’re measuring the faithfulness of God purely in material terms, when (as we’ve seen) that’s not necessarily the main way he blesses us; in a sense, they’re trying to dictate terms to God, which is nothing God’s going to accept. Second, in that respect, there’s an irony here in verse 15; God has just said, “Test my faithfulness, and watch me bless you,” and they say in response, “Blessed are the faithless, blessed are the evildoers, because they test God’s patience and get away with it.” Their sense of their relationship to God is more than a little askew here.

Third, consider the first question in verse 14: “What is the profit of keeping his requirements?” How would they know? They haven’t tried. They haven’t been keeping his requirements in worship, in their giving, in marriage—what exactly do they imagine they’ve done to deserve blessing? If you connect this with the next clause—which asks, what is the profit in going around as mourners, probably referring to formal rituals of penitence and expressions of grief for sin—it seems to me they want to get credit for just doing the stuff. They’re offering sacrifices, they’re giving something, they’re going around in sackcloth and ashes or whatever, and they want that to be good enough to satisfy God, and they’re mad that God isn’t going along with it. The reality is, God is only going to bless us on his own terms, as he sees fit, not on the basis of how we think things ought to go or what we think we deserve.

Interestingly, though, this time God doesn’t argue with his people. Instead, we get something very different in verse 16: we get a response to the prophet’s message. “Those who feared the Lord talked with each other,” and though we’re not told anything more than that, the Lord’s response is telling: “a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and honored his name.” Clearly, these are people who have truly heard what God is saying through his prophet, and they’ve been moved to recognize and repent of their sin; Malachi’s message has gotten through to them, and they’ve been inspired to a proper fear of the Lord.

This is something worth stopping to consider for a minute, because we don’t tend to talk about the fear of the Lord much, and yet it’s one of the key things that’s supposed to mark and define his people; and quite frankly, it’s an entirely appropriate response to some of the things Malachi has said. This is not an unhealthy fear, as if we were afraid God wanted to hurt us or might fail us; fear that God will not be as good as he has always been is not what we’re talking about. This is, rather, the same sort of healthy fear that you might feel standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon: this is something great and glorious and beautiful and far, far bigger than you, and while it bears you no ill will, if you treat it with disrespect, you will probably die.

In the same way, God is so good and holy and beautiful that we in our sin cannot bear the sight of him; nothing unholy and no impurity can survive in his presence—it burns like a moth in a flame. To come into the presence of God is, of necessity, judgment, as everything flammable burns away, and everything impure is refined and purified by fire. We cannot evade our unrighteousness when we look at God, and we can’t control him—not at all. We can’t make him do what we want, or keep him from doing what we do not want, and we cannot ensure that he will only ask us to do what we want to do and feel comfortable doing. As Mr. Beaver says of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, God is good, but he isn’t safe—he isn’t tame, and cannot be tamed. He is wild, unpredictable, utterly beyond us, and completely unrestricted by our sense of the possible; and while he has promised to provide all our needs, that doesn’t mean he’ll give us everything we think we need, nor does it mean he’ll let us keep those things we’re sure we can’t live without. As such, whoever commits to serve the Lord without being afraid of what they’re getting into clearly has no idea what they’re getting into.

And yet, those who fear the Lord are those who, in the end, have nothing to fear. Earlier, Malachi asked, “Who can endure the day of the Lord’s coming, and who can stand when he appears?” Here, he answers that question: those who fear the Lord and serve him, whom the Lord allows to stand. For them, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings—for in truth, the refining fire of God, our God who is a consuming fire, is his healing work in our lives; it’s painful, yes, but that pain is sin leaving the body. When at last he has fully purified us, when the light of his righteousness has fully risen upon us, we will finally be free from the blighting power of sin and death, and we will be released in his joy and his peace.

The Circle of Blessing

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(Malachi 3:6-12; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15)

I spent some time last week talking about our need for mercy, and I know that puzzled a couple people, since there’s nothing at all about mercy in last week’s passage from Malachi; but it seems to me that while that passage, which is the pivot point of this book and the central element in the prophet’s message, does indeed deal with the justice of God and his judgment on sin, it isn’t merely about justice.

As we saw, the initial complaint God raises in the end of chapter 2 is against those who are accusing him of being unjust for not judging their enemies, failing to recognize that by that same standard he’s also unjust for not judging them. I talked about this in terms of mercy, but the biblical language is more often of the patience or forbearance of God—his withholding his anger and his judgment on sin in order to give sinners opportunity to repent. Before we complain about this, we should remember that we, too, are its beneficiaries.

That’s underscored in verse 6, which is something of a transitional verse from the previous round of argument into this one; and what’s particularly interesting is that this verse links the patience of God with his people to his faithfulness, his unchanging nature and commitment to his word. “You, O children of Jacob”—righteous and unrighteous alike—“are not destroyed”: why? Because “I the LORD do not change.” Because when God says a thing, he will do it, when he makes a commitment, he holds to it, when he gives a promise, he keeps it—and when he chooses a person or a people, he does not let go, and he does not go back on his choice. He declares to Israel, in effect, that the only reason they still exist is because he is trustworthy—and the same is true for us. If we couldn’t trust God, we wouldn’t be here. Some of us wouldn’t be anywhere at all.

And yet, though we can trust him with our very lives, and with every part of our lives, we don’t, not consistently; sometimes we do better, but distrust keeps creeping in, and the desire to put our trust in ourselves. This is the crux of God’s charge against his people here in Malachi: they’re robbing him because they don’t trust him. They are literally faithless—lacking in the necessary faith to obey God fully. Obedience is an expression of trust; they do not trust, and so they do not obey.

We talked about this earlier this year with respect to money, considering our tendency to put our trust in our money (and our ability to earn more of it) rather than in God; and we’ve talked about it more generally as well, looking at the various ways that we draw back from obeying our Lord and heeding his call in our lives because we don’t quite believe that what he commands us to do is really best—we think we have a better idea. What I think we really need to hear is God’s response to this, which we see clear as crystal in the prophet, because it isn’t the demand for obedience that we tend to imagine.

Consider: the people of Israel are struggling to survive, and so they’re holding back on their giving to God—as they were cheating him with their sacrifices, as we saw a few weeks ago—because they don’t think they can afford to give the full tithe, the full 10%. In response, God says, “Robbing me with your giving isn’t the solution to your financial problems—it’s the cause of your problems. You’re struggling because I’m not blessing you, because you’re not being faithful to me in your giving.”

And then we get this: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house”—why? “Or else I’ll continue to curse you?” “Because it’s your duty?” “Because I said so?” No; instead, God says this: “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, and thereby put me to the test. See if I won’t throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there won’t be room to store it.” In a nutshell, God says, “Just trust me. Just trust me enough to obey me, that I will take care of you better than you can.”

Now, as we’ve noted before, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who gives faithfully will end up materially wealthy; God’s blessings go beyond just numbers in the bank account. But it is a promise that those who are faithful will be blessed in many ways, and that if the nation as a whole will give God what he requires, he will bless the nation and everybody will have enough, without having to fight so hard to survive. We will not have all we want, but he will never fail to give us all we need.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul takes this and develops it in a more individual direction. “You know how it works,” he says: “you reap what you sow. If you only sow a little seed, you only get a small harvest, but if you sow a great deal of seed, you reap a huge harvest.” This, Paul says, is how our giving works, too. We need to remember, first, that God owns everything, including all that is ours to use, and thus that he is ultimately the one who gives us success in our labors, not we ourselves; and second, that not only is he able to bless us with all good things, he wants to do so.

Thus Paul says in verse 8, “God is able to provide you with every kind of blessing in abundance, so that in every circumstance you may always have everything you need and still have ample resources for every kind of good work.” The word “blessing” here is the word kharis, the word “grace,” which underscores the point that the blessings in view here are spiritual, not just material; at the same time, the promise is clear that we don’t have to worry about money. If we give freely, generously and gladly to God, we will always have enough to live as he has given us to live, and to do what he has called us to do.

Note that “freely, generously and gladly” really does matter—how much we give matters, but so do why and how we give. Thus Paul tells the Corinthians, “If you really don’t want to give, or if you’re only giving under pressure or because you’re worried what others will think, then don’t; for it’s the cheerful and open-hearted giver that God loves.” The call is to give generously and gladly back to God from what he has given us, in gratitude for all the ways in which he has blessed us, believing that if we do so, he will continue to bless us and provide for all our needs. Again, the point is trust: are we willing to stake our lives on trust in God rather than trust in our own sweat and our own wits? That kind of trust, that kind of faith, is what God wants from us.

The fact that Paul describes the blessing of God in terms of grain, seed and bread, is telling, I think; because with grain, what you eat and what you sow are the same thing. As such, there’s always the tension—especially in poor areas—between how much of the crop you eat now and how much you sow back into the ground for next year. You can’t sow it all, obviously, or you’ll have nothing to eat this year; but if you eat too much of the harvest, then your harvest next year is guaranteed to be poor, because you can’t reap the benefits of seed you didn’t sow. That’s how it is with the blessings of God, because God hasn’t just blessed us for our own benefit: he’s blessed us so that we have things with which to bless others, and opportunities to do so. Like the grain, God’s gifts are partly for us to keep for ourselves and partly for us to sow in his service.

As such, there’s a feedback loop here; there’s a cycle, the circle of blessing. God provides for us, and out of his providence we give back to him, and that then becomes the basis for more of his blessings to us. This is how it works, how it’s designed to work; this is the nature of the blessings of God. It is God who gives the harvest, it isn’t our own doing, but he gives it out of what we have given back to him as our expression of humble faith in his provision; and then we give back to him again, and he returns again the harvest, and so it goes. Faith in action.