On this blog in history: March 18-31, 2008

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The heart of the matter
Not that I know God, but that he knows me.

Meditation on Holy Saturday and Easter
On the light of resurrection in a dead-grey world.

Bumper-sticker philosophy
Do people who say “question everything” really mean it?

Speaking prophetically
Critiquing the idea that the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. is a prophet of God.

Further thoughts on prophecy and Jeremiah Wright
On tests for a true prophet: risk, humility, and aim.

The fallacy of diagnosis
On why it’s wrong to identify other people as the problem.

Taking a look around

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I wasn’t out of touch with the world during our time away, just off the ‘Net for most of that time—but reading mediocre newspapers (which most of them are) and catching the occasional cable news show (sometimes with the sound off) doesn’t exactly give one a full-orbed view of current events; and then the first part of this week, I’ve been busy and occupied with other things, so it’s only been today that I’ve started to catch up a bit with the political news.

It’s interesting to see that Gov. Palin has pretty much gone mano a mano with President Obama over health care, defining the terms of the debate with her Facebook posts—to such an extent that even non-Palinites within the GOP are acknowledging that she’s taken the leadership of the party—and judging by the poll numbers, the Obama administration’s fixation on her, the recent market gains made by health insurers, and the decision of the Senate Finance Committee to drop consultations on end-of-life care from its version of the bill, it seems clear that she’s winning. Given that her op-ed on the cap-and-tax bill was a hammer blow to its political prospects, it would seem that Gov. Palin’s leadership has had a significant effect on the Obama administration’s legislative agenda.

Perhaps the most unnerving thing to happen during the last week or two was the White House’s decision to invite people to report on friends and neighbors who are opposed to Obamacare—something which doesn’t surprise me all that much, given the pattern of behaviorshown by Barack Obama and his coterie, but which is nevertheless concerning; on the bright side, at least it inspired a vintage effort from the redoubtable Mark Steyn in response.

As a result of all this, the polls aren’t being very kind to the president or his party. New Jersey is turning on his policies (and seems likely to put a Republican in the statehouse this fall), while Rasmussen is showing voters favoring the GOP on health care (and in fact on nearly every other issue as well) and the president’s approval ratings continuing to drop (just 47% approve, only 29% strongly, while 52% disapprove, including 65% of independents; on the bright side, only 37% strongly disapprove).

On a brighter note, it looks like our government has lost some of the bank bailout money:

Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation’s financial sector, it’s still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.

Nice job, guys. That’s definitely the sort of thing to make people think twice about giving the feds even more money to play with. And in the meantime, as the government’s left trying to clean up the mess made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, here comes their cousin Ginnie Mae to make a whole new one. Startlingly, Congress doesn’t see anything wrong with this (though if Ginnie Mae does indeed crash, they will no doubt look for some way to blame it on George W. Bush).

On the foreign policy front, the Marines have launched a major assault in Afghanistan; the incomparable Michael Yon reports (if you can get the video to work; I always have trouble with PJTV). I wish them well, but no foreign power has ever really won in Afghanistan, and I’m not confident we’ll be the first. (This, btw, was the problem with Senator Obama’s insistence that Iraq was the wrong war, that we should have been fighting in Afghanistan; fighting in Iraq drew al’Qaeda down from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts and streets of Iraq, where we could actually get at them.)

All this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of everything the president has to keep track of; and all we expect of our presidents is that they keep track of all of it and know what to do about all of it. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them . . . if it weren’t for the fact that they did everything possible to put themselves in that position.

When we say God works in mysterious ways . . .

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. . . this is the kind of thing we mean. I tend to think that there are folks out there through whom God decides to work in absolutely atypical ways, both because of who he’s made them to be and so that their lives would serve as reminders to the rest of us that he is in no wise limited to our conventional expectations or conventional wisdom; Tyler Dawn, I think, is one of those people. From my contact with her (all electronic, alas), I can say that she’s a remarkable woman of God with a remarkable faith who doesn’t fit any pattern any church I’ve ever run across would consider to be normal; that’s just her, and that’s just God. In this case, she has an amazing testimony of how God used her—through a series of hard and unpleasant and painful things—to expose a child molester and set a child free.

Go read it, and marvel at the hand of God; and after you’ve marveled a while, remember that what God’s on about in our lives is often something very different from what we’re on about, and in many cases something we can’t even see, because we don’t see the whole picture. What we think is the “A” plot of our lives right now might only really be a minor sub-plot, while God is at work telling a completely different story—and what is abject defeat in one might well be glorious victory in the other. Just as it was, as Tyler Dawn points out, for Joseph.

Fortunate defeat

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I was there when they crucified my Lord;
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.
I threw the dice when they pierced his side,
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide.

—U2/B. B. King, “When Love Comes to Town”

OK, so I was on a bit of a U2 kick this trip. Even so, this is a great lyric, and something every Christian ought to be able to sing full-throated, with a full heart.

God rocks

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Since this is sort of Jared Wilson Day around these parts, it seems like a good time to note a superb little post of his from this past Monday. In dealing with the silly question “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?” he said something very interesting, taking the question from an angle that had never occurred to me before and producing a truly profound response.

The truth is that God did make a weight so heavy he couldn’t lift it. He did so not by building an immovable force—we did that with our sin—but by incarnating the frailty of humanity and willingly subjecting himself to the force. As one of us, yet still himself, he created the conundrum of the incarnate God, bearing a cross he both ordained yet could not carry by himself, becoming condemned in death and also victorious. And God was crushed according to the plan he himself projected from the foundation of the world.

So, can God make a rock so heavy even he can’t lift it?

Yes. And he did. For three days only. And then he drop kicked it out of the mouth of the tomb.

Brilliant.

What I still haven’t found

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I believe in the Kingdom Come,
Then all the colours will bleed into one,
Bleed into one;
But yes, I’m still running.
You broke the bonds,
You loosed the chains,
You carried the cross and
All my shame,
All my shame;
You know I believe it.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

—U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

I don’t want to get into the argument about what U2 themselves mean by this song. According to the Wikipedia article, “both Bono and Edge have . . . called it a gospel song on numerous occasions,” and I have no reason to doubt that; I’ve seen other sites assert that they have repeatedly called it a song of “spiritual yearning,” which seems obvious enough, though I’ve never seen any original source for either of these attributions. At the same time, reading around the ‘Net, it’s clear that a lot of U2 fans don’t want to believe that the song’s about anything of the sort, and they’re entitled to their own opinions.

My interest at the moment, though, is rather different; if you wanted to be technical, I suppose you could say that I’m setting aside questions of authorial intent and opting for a bit of reader-response criticism. To wit, it occurred to me as I was listening to this song on the way home Monday that whatever U2 means by this song, it serves quite well as an apt expression of our experience of the process of sanctification (or of mine, at least). I believe all those things, too—and yet I would have to confess that in some ways, at least, I too am still running. There are still areas where I resist what God desires to do in my life, and areas in which I follow him determinedly until the temptation gets too tempting, at which point I run off like any other dumb sheep convinced that the grass over there really must be tastier. (Only to find out when I get there, as always, that the “grass” is really only extra-long Astroturf.)

I believe it all, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for—not in God, but in me, and in my own life. I haven’t found the trust, the submission, the willingness to follow faithfully; I’ve found the peace of God, but not the contentment to rest in it, and the joy of God, but not the single-mindedness to stay in it, instead of jumping off to go check out other things to see if they might be better. I’ve found the beauty of the gospel and the glorious blessing of the grace of God, but not the ability to wholeheartedly trust that they are for me. I preach it, I preach it constantly, but I do so as much as anything because I know I need to hear it, because I haven’t found it in me to fully believe it. Not yet.

But by the grace of God, I know I will—not by my efforts, but by his gift. His grace doesn’t depend on me, one way or the other; and whether I can always fully believe it or not, I know he who promised is faithful, and will do it. And for that I give thanks.

Your Jesus is too safe

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It’s a great pleasure to participate in the blog tour for Jared Wilson’s book Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior—though I must confess that the term “blog tour” gives me an image of a truly strange-looking trolley rolling along the infobahn, dinging merrily away, with a disembodied voice gravely intoning, “Next stop . . .” None of which, of course, has anything to do with the book.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Jared Wilson as a blogger and blog correspondent (for lack of a better term) for a couple years now, I had the privilege of meeting him in person and spending a little time with him at GCNC this past April, and I consider him a friend. I like and respect him a great deal.

Truth behind full disclosure: none of that affects my review of his book. If anything, it’s the other way around—this book captures much of the reason why I like and respect Jared. When Ed Stetzer begins the foreword by declaring, “The pages you are about to read are an antidote,” he’s right; and it’s an antidote that far too much of the American church badly needs.

An antidote to what? To the legalistic no-gospel that fills so much of the American church—conservative as well as liberal; some of the worst offenders consider themselves “evangelical”—and our convenient, comfortable, sanitized, commoditized caricatures of Jesus, all precisely designed to meet our felt needs. As Jared says, our culture is plenty familiar with Postcard Jesus, Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Jesus, Hippie Jesus, Buddy Jesus, ATM Jesus, Role Model Jesus, and Therapeutic Jesus, and many Christians are thrilled when some famous person or other gives thanks to Grammy Award Speech Jesus; but the real Jesus, the Jesus we find in Scripture, is an altogether unfamiliar figure, because all too many churches aren’t preaching him. After all, he makes us uncomfortable, and he makes the world uncomfortable, and that’s no way to grow a church, now, is it?

To this kind of thinking, Jared offers his book as an antidote, driven by the love of Christ and the provocation of the Spirit of God. As he writes (239-40),

The passion of my life is the scandalous gospel of God’s amazing grace in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit cultivated this passion in me through the Scriptures, in which I see Jesus chastised and criticized for proclaiming the gospel by eating with sinners and giving himself to sinners. My encouragement to you—my call to you—is to partake of that gospel, to acknowledge and confess and believe that you are a sinner in need of God’s grace, and that Jesus Christ died and rose to manifest that grace to you, and that you can’t live without Jesus. You cannot do it.

That is the sort of thing that ought to be the lifeblood of every Christian and the heartbeat of every church . . . and it isn’t. It isn’t because we don’t take our sin seriously enough, and we don’t take Jesus seriously enough. The purpose of this book is to change that, for those who have ears to hear.

To do this, Jared presents what he calls twelve portraits of Jesus, looking at Christ from twelve different angles, through a dozen different lenses. He considers:

  • Jesus the Promise
  • Jesus the Prophet
  • Jesus the Forgiver
  • Jesus the Man
  • Jesus the Shepherd
  • Jesus the Judge
  • Jesus the Redeemer
  • Jesus the King
  • Jesus the Sacrifice
  • Jesus the Provision
  • Jesus the Lord
  • Jesus the Savior

Some of these sound familiar to American ears, while others are quite strange (I can imagine readers asking “Jesus the Provision? What does he mean by that?”); but the truth is that even the familiar ones have been trimmed and tamed, made safe and non-threatening and altogether nice, in the teaching of far too much of the church in this culture. Not to put too fine a point on it, far too many of us in this country aren’t Christians at all but idolators, worshiping a Jesus of our own invention who is nicely tuned to tell us just what we want to hear. In response, Jared sets out to open our eyes to what it really means that Jesus was a fully human adult male, or that he is the King of Kings. In so doing, he will no doubt make a lot of folks very, very uncomfortable—but it’s a holy discomfort, the evidence of the Spirit of God at work.

In painting his portraits of Jesus, Jared draws heavily on Scripture, as he should; this is a book filled with biblical quotations, and not just single verses, but whole passages. Of course, there are plenty of books out there which quote a lot of Scripture and then proceed to misuse it, but that isn’t a problem here; one of the chief qualities of the book is its careful attention to what Scripture is actually saying, and its author’s clear determination to follow wherever the word of God leads and let the chips fall where they may. Rather than using the Bible to make his points, he has sought to place himself under the Bible and its authority, and thus to say only what it says.

This is not to say, however, that he has produced a book which is disconnected from life as we know it; quite the contrary. The academic foundation is clearly there, but this is no theoretical discussion; it is, rather, a profoundly practical book—or perhaps we might say, following G. K. Chesterton, that it is a profoundly unpractical book in all the right ways. Chesterton has one of his characters, the poet and painter Gabriel Gale, offer to help a man who has attempted suicide, explaining his offer with these words:

I am no good at practical things, and you have got beyond practical things.

What you want is an unpractical man. . . . What can practical men do here? Waste their practical time in running after the poor fellow and cutting him down from one pub sign after another? Waste their practical lives watching him day and night, to see that he doesn’t get hold of a rope or a razor? Do you call that practical? You can only forbid him to die. Can you persuade him to live? Believe me, that is where we come in. A man must have his head in the clouds and his wits wool-gathering in fairyland, before he can do anything so practical as that.

Chesterton was right: the practical counsels of this world can only forbid people to die (or, more ominously, order them to die); they cannot persuade people to live, much less tell them how. That is for unpractical people, for those who have given their lives over to the unpractical mendicant teacher from Nazareth, and in so doing have learned how to live; and to illustrate that, Jared offers a number of stories of just what that unpractical life looks like. Some, like the story of the Amish of Quarryville, PA who forgave the man who murdered their daughters, are widely known; others, like the story of his cousins Steve and LaVonne Jones and their son Colton (which, as a father of three, wrenched at my heart), are not. All bear witness to the truth that it’s only in the real Jesus Christ, not any of the more “practical” or “useful” versions of him that we invent, that we find real life.

The tone of this book is informal and conversational, at times snarky and sarcastic (though the bulk of that is to be found among its copious and entertaining footnotes), and occasionally slangy; some, at least of older generations, may find that off-putting at points. In general, however, I don’t think any but the most formal of readers will find it a true problem, while younger folks in particular will likely find the tone attractive and appealing. Taken as a whole, I believe the conversational tone is a benefit to the book, for a couple reasons.

One, it suits the author; I don’t have any way of knowing if attempting to write in a more formal style would have made him sound stuffy and pedantic, but writing in this vein makes it clear that he is anything but. That’s disarming, which is a good thing; given that he’s calling his readers to set aside our comfortable Jesuses for one who will challenge us and make us very uncomfortable with ourselves, the natural response from many will be to look for a reason to reject that call. Many will no doubt find reasons, but branding Jared as stuffy and out of touch won’t be one of them.

Two, the book’s tone serves to reinforce the point that its message is for all of us, and all of life. Following Christ isn’t just about doing formal things for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but it’s about how we’re supposed to live all the rest of the time, too; it has to do with cracks about old teen movies and popular fiction just as much as with the sorts of things we think of as “spiritual.”

The great risk Jared took with this book—one which he himself acknowledges—is that in looking at Jesus from twelve different perspectives, he might have “inadvertently propose[d] twelve different Jesuses, creating intellectual confusion where the purpose has been to enhance clarity.” I think, though, that he has avoided that quite successfully by tracing one strong theme through all twelve chapters: “the great unifying presence of the gospel.” This is the hub of which the twelve perspectives are spokes, as he lays out in the conclusion of the twelfth chapter (280):

The good news is that Jesus Christ is not just God with us, but he’s also God forus. For us, he is the promise of fulfillment, the prophet of truth, the forgiver of sins, the man of sorrows, the good shepherd, the righteous judge, the redeemer, the reigning king, the atoning sacrifice, the all-sufficient provision, the almighty God, and the rescuer of the lost. He is all these things and more, but none of this is good news if he is not also the Lord and the Savior of sinners in need of grace.

Today is the day of salvation. The kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe.

If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Jared Wilson has written a book that is full of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that shines the light of that gospel from every page, and that I believe will call many in this country to that gospel for the first time. It is a book for the reconversion of the church, and for the conversion of many who are outside the church because they’ve rejected our false Jesuses, not knowing that the real Jesus is someone altogether different. It’s a book we need to read, not because Jared is wonderful, but because Jesus is wonderful, and Jared is talking about Jesus. It is, in short, a book for which we can honestly say, “Thank you, God.”

Seen on a billboard

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along US 30 in rural Pennsylvania west of Pittsburgh—two-panel, comic-strip style, a slice of a conversation between two characters. One says to the other, “What do you mean, I can’t take a joke? I took you.” (The quote may not be completely exact in the first few words, but the rest stuck firmly in my brain.)

I wasn’t in a position to stop and look closely at the billboard, and the way the road was winding, I didn’t get a long look at it, so I have no idea who put it up, or why, or what their purpose was; whatever their reason, that’s an extraordinarily cruel line, in my humble opinion. It appears that what I saw is part of a larger campaign, because I saw a different two-panel comic-strip billboard in my rear-view mirror later on—I have no idea what it said, though, so it doesn’t bring me any closer to knowing what these billboards are about.

All of this has left me curious. I tried Googling the first billboard I saw, but with no result. Does anybody know anything about these billboards and their purpose?

Note on the past week

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If anyone wondered about the radio silence around here the last several days, you may be assured that I haven’t run out of things to say (not that anyone who knows me would consider that likely); rather, we were on vacation in Pennsylvania and found ourselves unexpectedly without Internet access for most of the week. I had the chance to spend time with dear friends, see Gettysburg for the first time, and go to the wedding of one good friend from college—and even, unexpectedly, to participate: the minister, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, invited all pastors present to come up and lay hands on the couple for the prayer of blessing. It was a wonderful moment in perhaps the best wedding I’ve ever seen. (I can’t speak for my own, though I love the pastors who married us dearly—I was too busy getting married to absorb much of what was going on.) Leaving my own wedding aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more joyful bride, or felt happier for a wedding couple.

I have to say, too, if there’s a template for what a truly gospel-driven wedding ceremony looks like, that had to be it, or pretty close. If you happen to be looking for a gospel-driven church in Pittsburgh, I can recommend Bellefield Presbyterian without question or hesitation; just from the wedding ceremony, I can say with complete assurance that the pastor there, the Rev. Dr. R. Geoffrey Brown, is a man of God who glories, delights, exults, revels in the gospel of Jesus Christ and proclaims it with deep joy and humility. He and his wife are also wonderful people—of that much I have no doubt, even from my brief contact with them. It was a true joy and blessing to be a part of that worshipping community this past Saturday.