Far too easily pleased

C.S. Lewis’s famous passage in The Weight of Glory bears repeating in this blog:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (26)

God let me find by faith such joys in your right hand that I will release all others.

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/we-are-far-too-easily-pleased

Authority issues (Freedom is not independence)

In church this week, Jeff Noble compared King Solomon to King Jesus. When Solomon became king he had to consolidate his empire by eliminating several people who posed threats to his power. For example, his brother Adonaijah, who had already tried to take the throne, without David’s consent. Jesus, in the same way, will consolidate his kingdom. In the apocalypse he will come as a warrior with a flaming sword, surrounded by his angel army. On that day “every knee shall bow,” and those who in life rejected his kingship will then be rejected from his kingdom. As Jeff said, “He will tolerate no challenge to his authority.” There’s no doubt about it: You don’t have to look very far in the Bible to perceive that God asserts unequivocal, unflinching, absolute authority over creation.

Jeff also said that we in the modern West have authority issues. Ever since the Boston Tea Party, Americans have been throwing off yokes with a cry of, “Freedom!” You can see it in our political parties, our approaches to sex, sexual orientation, medical decisions, guns, property (“get offa my land!”), money, lifestyle, music, fashion, you name it. Take it from Miley Cyrus in her hit We Can’t Stop:

It’s our party we can do what we want to
It’s our house we can love who we want to
It’s our song we can sing we if we want to
It’s my mouth I can say what I want to

Independence and equality is deeply rooted into the American value system. And for good reason, I’ll say. It has developed out of oppression and inequality. The Boston Tea Party, from King George III. The French Revolution, from the strangling of the poor. Civil rights, from racism and slavery. We are right to champion freedom and equality and resist undue assertions of authority.

However, this same skepticism of authority has gradually doubled back on God. When we postmodernists bump up against this absolutely authoritative King God, some of us recoil in revulsion (“How dare this God demand to be worshiped? How selfish!”)(cf. Oprah). Some of us just don’t connect with that part of God. We obey him out of obligation and fear and performance-based acceptance. But whether we are the prodigal or the older brother in the story of the prodigal son, whether we run away from God’s authority or try lock-step conformity, something is missing. The Bible calls us to embrace and love God’s authority (cf. Basically all of Psalm 119).

How do we do that? How do we love and embrace God’s authority?

I believe the answer is in part that God’s grace enlightens our hearts to depend on God’s strong hand like a son does his father, and find it more freeing than independence.

Freedom and independence aren’t always the same. Independence means not needing other things. Take marriage for example. If my wife and I are living in a dysfunctional cycle where I come home and do my own thing, don’t talk to her, don’t pay attention to her, and she does the same thing, keeping to her room, ignoring and avoiding me, are we independent? In a sense our relationship is more independent than it should be. We don’t rely on each other to do anything. However, is that relationship free? I don’t think so. Pins and needles. Awkwardness. Unaddressed hurt. That relationship is a ball and chain, and the more independent you become, the heavier the weight secretly gets. That’s because freedom isn’t just being in charge of yourself, cut loose, independent: Freedom is being properly dependent. For the slave, it means getting out of there, but for marriage, it means coming together and learning how to communicate needs and meet each others needs in love.

As marital freedom comes through right dependence in marriage, so ultimate freedom comes through right dependence on God. God made us for relationship with him, so freedom means learning our roles in relationship to him. For example, my money is not my domain, it is God’s gift, and I am a steward. When I learn that role, I can loosen my death grip on the wad of cash and be generous. And as I do it, trusting in God to provide what I need instead of myself, I learn that he is much better suited to the task, and I can breath easy, and finally be free. While assertion of authority by a man against another man is often oppression, when God asserts his authority, it is like the strong hands of a father as he reaches over his frustrated child, trying to unscrew a cap, and says, “Here, let me.”

We are left to decide whether we will yank our bottle away from the Father and say, “No, it’s mine!” or yield willingly to his strong hands and learn how much love resides within his power. The issue of how we handle God’s assertion of authority is in the end a question of whether we know and believe that he loves us. In any sphere in which we know the love of God, by faith, by his precious and very great promises, we will not WANT to do it on our own. We will embrace his authority as a child does that of a good father whom he knows loves him back. We will find freedom in dependence.

Are Allah and God the same?

Well, in some sense, yes. Allah is simply the Arabic word for “God” – Arabic language Bibles use that word too. And of course, Islam shares a large amount of historical ground with Christians and Jews. They too worship “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Any Muslim will tell you that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God. It’s just that Jews and later Christians mistook, perverted, or forgot the teaching of their prophets, and so God finally sent his final, once-for-all revelation (through Mohammed), promising that this time, he would protect it forever against human tampering. So Muslims believe that Christians are simply misguided worshippers of Allah.

It’s true, Christianity and Islam are 99% the same in the essence of daily life and outward practice of faith (prayer, fasting, charity, praise and worship, etc.). The more I learn from Muslims about the inner workings of their faith, the more I am impressed and amused by how remarkably similar we are. Many missionaries encourage Muslim converts to keep many of their practices when they become “followers of Isa”.

However, if we’re talking about the true identity of the God that Christians worship and the God that Muslims worship, I believe they are seriously different.

Islam is all about the absolute unity of God. It’s called Tawhid, the oneness and uniqueness of God. In fact, associating any created thing with Allah is called “shirk” and is an unpardonable sin. In Islam Jesus is a great and special prophet. They even believe he will come back from heaven. But by no means did he share in Godhood (nor did he claim to until his followers put words in his mouth).

This collides with the Christian concept of God as trinity, and subsequently with the hypostatic union of Christ (100% God and 100% man). These two concepts of God have been nonnegotiable elements of Christian doctrine since the earliest councils that defined the faith. They’re not just important because all Christians hold them; they are paradoxes of faith that are essential parts of the gospel. We must believe that Jesus is God because if Jesus is not God, his death is a mere example of obedience, not atonement laden with the infinite power of divine blood, and his resurrection was not victory over death on our behalf. (It is no coincidence that Islam teaches that Jesus did not die on the cross and was not resurrected.) While Christians do affirm with Muslims that Christ is prophet, they believe he is so much gloriously, crucially more. His claims about himself according to the Bible (his co-creation of the world, eternal existence, one-mindedness with God, claiming the name I AM, the ability to forgive sins and to curse, etc.) were drastically presumptuous “shirk” if he was not in fact God Himself. As C.S. Lewis said, “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse…let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

So the question of the identity of Jesus ends up redefining our concept of God/Allah at the root level from which faith springs, causing a butterfly effect that seismically splits between man-trying-to-get-to-God religion and God-coming-to-man gospel. The hope of the believer is not in prayers, in fasting, in praise and worship, in devotion, in charity, in honorable living, or in any of the other thousand surface things that Islam and Christianity have in common; our hope is in Allah who took on flesh to do what we could never do, to live the human life we should have lived, and to die the death we should have died, Immanuel, God With Us.

Morning song of praise

The Lord is kind and generous

Hearing the cry of his children

His mercies are refreshed with the sunrise

His compassion with the spring rain

He has spared nothing to be near us his children

Through Mary he entered the world of flesh

And being pierced he wove together

Mortal and immortal

His justice is a wall with high towers

Surely man will account for all his deeds

And we will have true equality there

When we kneel before the throne

He is a writer who gives life to souls in his book

And with the stroke of his will causes me to be

He has written my days and my departure

And my soul’s destiny belongs to him

And yet while I live he gives inexplicable dignity

To love freely, and be created by my loves

And if I choose and if he wills to find my way

To the fountain of delights and king of salem

He is the keynote to which all peace is tuned

All mankind and I are restless till we rest in you

So while we are all walking home, lead me

Toward your sweet chambers, my love, my God

Can universities do without God?

A while ago I went to a lecture at Virginia Tech from a guest professor, Dr. James Anderson, entitled “Why Universities Can’t Do Without God: The theistic foundations of modern education and research.” Let me try to get the gist of his argument down.

(1) The existence of universities assumes the existence of two things: rational thought and objective moral standards.

Dr. Anderson pointed out that things like university honor codes, the protection of intellectual property rights, and expectations for the behavior of students, faculty and staff, are all based on the assumption that objective moral standards exist. As if to corroborate his point, about a week after the lecture, I got an email that was distributed to the entire VT community announcing the 2012 rights and responsibilities of the Virginia Tech community. It set forth strong moral expectations for everyone in the community. Furthermore, I got an email about a university-wide initiative to support charities, with the encouragement to “have a heart and do our part” – an appeal to moral virtues like selflessness and generosity.

Secondly, Anderson pointed out that rational thought is an assumed foundation upon which the university is built. Academic discourse and scientific inquiry in any field of research attempts to articulate, ascertain and define realities. The principles or reason and argument are inherent. Truth values for statements are assumed.

The next part of his argument is constructed in modus tollens. He argues that, if God does not exist, these two things could not exist either. To show this, he quotes four prominent atheist philosophers who discuss the implications of an honest, consistent atheistic worldview on the issues of objective morality and rational thought.

[at this point my notes vanish. Oh well, I present the above for what it’s worth]

Old Testament laws in perspective

I once had a conversation with a friend who said that the God revealed in the Old Testament seemed, generally, a ruthless, crude, righteousness-and-damnation God who demanded sacrifice and killed those who disobeyed, in stark contrast to God in the New Testament. “Can they be the same God?” he asked. I didn’t really know how to answer him. I think you’ll agree: at first glance, God seems to soften out quite a bit in the New Covenant. But God is unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and forever. It’s suspicious if his demeanor changes significantly over time. So why is the Old Testament the way it is?

Paul Copan’s book Is God a Moral Monster? has helped a lot. It addresses the accusations of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchins, etc.) that the God of the Old Testament was a self-centered God who endorsed polygamy, misogyny, and genocide (of the Caananites), and who enforced all sorts of irrational laws (the cleanliness and dietary laws). Above Copan’s tactful exegesis of difficult passages, including many linguistic considerations that alleviate common misreadings, he posits a general perspective toward the Old Testament that is capable of assimilating the almost-embarrassing passages of the Old Testament on a sweeping scale. In essence, he argues that the Old Testament laws were not an ultimate moral code – they were neither intended to be permanent, nor did they claim to be. This complies with overall Biblical teaching on the dispensation of the covenants, where the Old Law served as a tutor and temporary preparation until the coming of the Messiah.

Furthermore, the laws self-admittedly conceded to many immoral realities of the ancient Near East, but in addressing those realities, they did not endorse them. They were examples of “case law” that assumed an undesirable event in order to explain what sort of remedial action ought to be taken in that case. In this way the Old Testament is full of examples of negotiation with the errors of the ancient Near East, to draw them significantly albeit relatively, closer to the absolute moral standards. They are contextualized scaffolding, and should not be confused with the ideals themselves.

I am who I am

In semantics theory, nouns are defined essentially as things that, when you add a predicate [event or attribute] to them, make a statement with truth value [are either true or false]. For example, “Bob” is something that needs a predicate like “breathes”, and when you put them together, “Bob breathes” should be true or false for a given model of the world.

Paradoxically, verbs are no more seminal. They are defined as things that, when you add a noun [entity] to them, make a statement with truth value. “Breathes” needs a noun to make the statement “Bob breathes.”

One of the beautiful things about God’s name YHWH, “I am that/who I am”, is that it is a paradoxical loop. The subject is defined by the predicate, and the predicate is defined by the subject. God seems to say, “You want me to define myself? My being itself is a statement.” He is the one thing that doesn’t need something else to be true. To have truth value, every entity needs a predicate, every predicate needs to have an entity as its subject. But God is both: He Himself is true. That is so beautifully and mysteriously evident in The Name.

There is no subject about which God can predicate, no thing that he describes, nothing outside of himself. He is not bound by any external concept. Similarly, no predicate can comprehend and define God the Subject. The only way to describe God is Himself. “God is love” (1 John) does not mean that love delimits or defines God, but that God is God, and love is a part of God. God defines love.

He defines everything, in fact. See, everything else in the world is either subject or predicate, swirling around in a circus of dependent definitions. When I want to know what some new thing is, I will look it up in Wikipedia or the Dictionary. When I want to know what God is, I must sit in holy silence, “be still and know that He is.” He is the root of all being, the paradox, the first mover, the uncaused cause, the self-defining entity. I AM WHO I AM. There is no more awesome name, none worthy of greater awe and worship. Hallelujah: Praise be to YHWH.

The necessity of trust in the Scriptures

It is essential to the Christian faith that God exists and that he can, and has, and continues to, show up and reveal himself to humans. Furthermore, Christianity essentially affirms that God’s revelation to man has been captured in the Holy Scriptures.

Much of the latest textual critics and historians downplay and invalidate the events recorded in the Bible. They believe later political and religious leaders (Pharisees or the like, probably) tampered with the story to solidify their hold on the kingdom of Israel, or to gain power for the Levitical order, or etc.

This is not an option for the Christian: We must believe that that God’s revelation is available to us now, in an essentially and sufficiently accurate form. Why? Because this is the bedrock of Christianity. Historical revelations define our collective concept of who God is, how we are to relate to him, and what he wants from us. Believing in God is inextricably linked to believing in his Word – the only means by which we know him, being the revelation of the Unseen God who “dwells in unapproachable light.” The Word is in core essence Jesus Himself, but by extension, and by similar pattern, his Word means that set of linguistic information by which the Word from the Father is made known to our individual hearts, namely, Scripture. Without the Word (logos), preached from human mouths and preserved in the sacred texts, we cannot possess the Living Word (rhema), with which the Spirit of Jesus feeds our souls and gives us New Life. Without the Scriptures, our link to a true knowledge of God is severed.

We must believe that all that God requires us to know about him will by him be preserved and made available to his people in every age. He cannot be thwarted by conniving religious leaders or sloppy scribes who would attempt to distort his word. Nothing can sever Jesus, the Head, from His Body. Thus the Christian must affirm and believe a doctrine of the divine preservation of revelation (the inerrancy of scripture, as it is usually called).

This affirmation of the Scriptures is not blind; it is based on significant textual and historical evidence. The fact is that the Bible contains some of the best-preserved ancient documents available in the science of textual criticism, and to pick and choose which parts of it we think have been tampered with or haven’t, based on how odd they appear to us (or, again, to select critics who agree with us), is to act with dangerous ignorance.

We must trust Scripture, even when it doesn’t make sense. We cannot deny revelation because it is contrary to what we would have preferred or expected. That is to commit a grievous evil: to believe that our imagination or reason (or that of whatever other human philosophers we happen to agree with) is sufficient to bring us to a true knowledge of God. In reality, it is only when God makes himself known to man that man can know God. As John Piper says:

“He is what you’ve got to deal with in reality. Therefore our role is not to tell him how it is, but to learn how it is, and then adapt our little finite minds and hearts to the way he is…so that we bring our minds and hearts into conformity with Reality, namely, God.”

The Christian accepts all of scripture, even if he does not understand it. Even if it is quite inconvenient. Even if battles of contextual criticism rage on in academia (which they will always do). We must trust in the scriptures, not as the source of Life of themselves, but as our link to Jesus, the Word, who himself is our link to the Father, and our Eternal Hope.

Killing the Canaanites: Part 4

Did God really tell the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites?

From Part 3, we know that God uses people to accomplish his purposes, and that even if his purposes included killing other humans, his human instruments would be justified in doing so – and even bound to do so. But countless people over the centuries have claimed to have received revelation from God to kill people, and committed atrocities as a result. The Crusades and the Inquisition come to mind, not to mention many smaller lashings-out from people bearing the name of YHWH. Were the Israelites deluded just like them? Was their leader Moses, who told them to do these severe deeds?

Let’s also assume for our argument that the Bible reflects the true revelation of God. If you don’t agree, check out this article, which evolved as a bubble off of the current article. Now, from scripture, did the Israelites have reason to believe that God was really speaking to them through Moses when Moses told them to kill the Canaanites? Quite a lot of reason, in fact. The whole period was loaded to the brim with miracles!

Moses performed the 10 signs – the 10 plagues on the Egyptians – which made even hard-hearted Pharaoh acknowledge that God’s power was behind him
God appeared to Israel as a mysterious of cloud by day and fire by night
Israel had just experienced the Parting of the Red Sea (!)
Moses received the law on top of a smoking mountain atop which thunder and lighting crashed, and his face was glowing when he came down
God provided manna and quail for them to eat in the desert
God made water come out of a rock when Moses struck it (at Meribah)
Israel defeated the attacking Amalekites whenever Moses was raising his arm, but lost whenever he dropped his arm
God sent a plague among the Israelites after they made the golden calf
Israel would have remembered the promise to their father Abraham that they would return to Canaan (Genesis 15).

Etcetera etcetera. The whole exodus and redemption of the Israelite nation, and the formation of God’s covenant with them, had been filled with incredible miracles and signs. So Israel had every reason to believe that God was really speaking to them through Moses – not that Moses or any human contrivance was responsible for the command to kill the Canaanites. Therefore, if we have accepted the Biblical narrative as part of our faith in God, it follows that God really was responsible for the command to the Israelites, and that many miracles and signs affirmed this to the Israelites themselves. They and we both have reason to believe that they heard the divine voice giving them the solemn command to invade and “devote to destruction.”

Killing the Canaanites: Part 3

Can God use people to kill other people?

Say (from Part 2) that God is just in killing the Canaanites. But what about the Israelites themselves? Was it wrong for THEM to kill the Canaanites? Isn’t murder wrong, period? Shouldn’t God have used some non-human means to wipe out the Canaanites, like a plague, and then had His people enter the promised land peaceably?

God Used Israel
First of all, it is immediately and abundantly clear that, throughout history, God uses people to accomplish his divine purposes. For example, all of the prophets, the Levitical priesthood (who were the ministers through which God interacted with man in the OT) and the New Priesthood of the Church (Christ’s Body and manifestation, through which he continually interacts with the world). Israel was nationally part of this, as part of God’s promise in the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. So, it is clear from the Biblical narrative that God was using Israel in a special way to accomplish his purposes.

It’s Possible for Killing to be Just
There’s no real conflict with “God can use people to accomplish his purpose”…unless his purpose is killing others. Is it wrong for people to kill other people? Ethics provides a decisively indecisive answer. Although some in the Categorical or Deontological ethical camps would haggle with wording, the vast majority of people consent that, in some of the most extreme circumstances, administering death to a fellow human is the best possible course of action. For example, if a policeman happened upon Sandy Hook Elementary in the middle of the Newton, CT massacre, he would have been justified in stopping the massacre by shooting the gunman. The same would be true of the slaughter that happened in 2006 on the very campus where I sit writing this (Virginia Tech). Isn’t killing out of self defense sometimes acceptable (for example, resistance against a military invasion)?Furthermore, when we think of certain extremely corrupt parties, killing seems more justified: Consider the “Lord’s Resistance Army” that has forcibly conscripted children for several decades. If you were in a village when that army was raiding, abducting, killing and raping, would just men not be rightly inspired to fight back? The point is, killing is wrong for certain reasons, not absolutely or inherently. What are those reasons?

What Makes Killing Wrong?
This is the most fascinating part of this argument to me. What, fundamentally, makes the taking of human life right or wrong? Human life is valuable and protected under morality because it is a God-given right. From Genesis we see that we were made in God’s image, and that brings with it a sacredness. From the covenant with Noah we see a reinforcement of this:

Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man. (Gen. 9:6)

When David killed Uriah and took his wife Bathsheba, he uttered this:

Against you, you only, I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight… (Psalm 51:4)

How can killing a man be a sin against God, not against that man? Well, as we established in Part 2, man has no right over his own life. But God does. Human life is sacred because it is given by (and patterned after the image of) YHWH, the God of Life. Therefore, killing is wrong because it usurps God’s authority to give and take the breath of life. The Noah verse explains why it is justifiable to kill the VT or Newton gunmen, etc. God has decreed that he has appointed the right to take a man’s life to his neighbor, should that man himself take innocent life. So in those cases, God’s right has been delegated, not usurped.

Presumption vs. Obedience
But what about a different circumstance: What if God tells man to take a life of a non-murderer? In that case, the One who has the right to take the life is still consenting to the act. In fact, he is initiating the act by direct command, instead of perennial decree, which makes it even more binding. One may object, “But a man hasn’t got the right to take another man’s life! You just said it was God’s right, not man’s.” Maybe, but it is not presumptuous to obey a command to do something that one has no authority to do on his own. If Bobby is playing videos games, and Johnny comes in and unplugs the game console, he acts presumptuously, because the video games are the property of their dad, and their dad has by default given both boys the right to play the game. Therefore Johnny violates the right that his dad has given to Bobby. However, if their dad told Johnny to unplug it for some reason (say an electrical emergency) and Johnny unplugs the console, he acts lawfully. Furthermore, he does not even have to fully understand the reasons that their dad had. His moral responsibility is to obey.

Therefore, the Bible clearly claims that God was using the Israelites to accomplish his purposes. It is not unequivocally wrong to kill: it is wrong to kill whenever you rob the right to give and take life from God. Thus, if God sanctions it, the normal moral rule doesn’t apply. This removes another chunk of ground from the objections to the killing of the Canaanites. In Part 4, we’ll look at the question of whether the Israelites really did receive a command to annihilate from God (or, in particular, whether they had sufficient reasons to believe that they had received such a command).