Supplementing faith

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 1:5-8

There is a conscious effort to the life of a Christian once he has been awakened. Both justification and sanctification are initiated and accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by us; but there is an added responsibility on the child of God once he has been educated by the Spirit and begun to be like Christ. We are to work together with the Spirit, to “work out what he has worked in” (Chambers) even as the Spirit Himself works the purification of our hearts (Philippians 2:12-13). The mark of a partially sanctified heart is that it wants to be more sanctified, and thus moves to participate in the continuing sanctifying work that the Spirit oversees from start to finish (Philippians 1:6).

A good way to conceptualize this is comes from the term “supplement” ( epichorēgeō – “supply, provide, furnish”) in 2 Peter 1:5. We are to nourish and feed our faith with these things – virtue, knowledge, self-control…they are the nutrients that help faith grow. Imagine a man who has just come out of a heart attack coma. Once he realizes he has been in a state of near-death, he must eat, drink, take vitamins to restore his health and energy. When he is stronger, he must then begin to exercise, and mind hid diet, and in general change the lifestyle behaviors that contributed to the heart attack. Consciousness brings with it a responsibility to work toward the change of his body. A man who continued to sit on his couch and eat cheeseburgers and neglect his heart attack medicine would deserve a second heart attack.

Likewise for the person who has been awakened by the grace of Christ. Upon realizing that he has been quite spiritually ill up to that point in his life, he must immediately take actions to supply his new faith with nourishment. Each of the qualities in Peter’s list comes from God, but is manifested through the struggle and decision of the man. If we know that God has given us by his grace the precious gift of belief, the only response is to do everything in our power to nourish, protect, and supply that belief, that it might grow strong and take inseparable root in our hearts.

Let the man who has been saved from heart attack supplement healthy living and medicine, and let the man who has been saved from sin supplement the grace of God with every effort to make his own faith in God grow.

Social justice and right worship are inextricable

Social justice and right worship go hand in hand. I’m reading The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, and he presents some pretty convincing scriptures. But I also stumbled on one today. Jeremiah is standing in the gateway of the temple, proclaiming that they must amend their ways before the Lord will allow them to dwell there. Symbolically, this means dwelling with God/in his house, or by extension, being in right relationship with him. And what are the means of “amending ways”? Here’s what it says:

For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, if you do not oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever. (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

Notice that there were two things lacking for the people of Israel: “justice one with another” and “not going after other gods”. In other words, Israel was wrongly dealing with each other and wrongly setting their objects of worship. Social justice and right worship of God seem to here be linked. It reminds me of how Jesus responded when questioned about the greatest commandment.

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:35-40)

Again, loving God and loving others are inextricably linked.

What does this mean? A worship of God, devoid of a lifestyle of motion toward others and concern for the “least of these”, is incomplete, and might be evidence of a merely moralistic or cultural faith in God. Good people believe in God, read the Bible, go to church, pray, etc. But often, these “good people” tend to cluster up and feel good about their goodness and start to disdain the messy, sinful world. The Kingdom of God is not for good people, but redeemed people. It’s for people who get the messiness of life but have been joyfully ravished by Christ’s forgiving love. He came to us, lived among us, and opened a way of hope when we were spiritually poor, starving, disease-infected, hopeless wretches. So in some sense, serving the poor resembles what Christ did on the cross more closely than does going to church, or other acts of personal piety. Social justice sometimes has more potential than religious observance to demonstrate a sweetly broken understanding of the Gospel.

The link between justice and true worship also means that acts of social justice, if not done out of worship to God and in light of (in response to) Christ’s redemption, are vain. They are merely marks on the imaginary ledger by which “good people” earn their way to heaven, or whatever state of self-satisfaction they prefer. There are countless good causes available to us today. Invisible Children, Project Red, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital…I encounter them everywhere. But what will these acts of kindness yield to people if not accompanied by the Gospel of Christ, and carried by a member of His Body? Such deeds will fill the stomach, but not quench the longings of the heart. They will prolong the life of the body, but not resuscitate the stillborn soul. They will rescue children from captivity to evil men, but leave the chains of oppression on their scar-riddled hearts. No, without the message of Divine Grace, there is no true freedom. Social justice is very dear to the heart of God, yet it is incomplete without Him. You cannot merely treat the skin when the heart is sick.

So social justice and right worship are inextricable. The Kingdom of God spans heaven and earth and fuses them mysteriously, gloriously. It must touch both. We must touch both. May God give us the strength to stand in the gap between God and Man and live out the Good News in all its fullness.

Why bad stories are good

Why is a “really bad life” a better testimony than a “raised in the church” one, even though every person with the baggage wishes they had the story of the safer person? Their stories are not better in the sense of being more holy or satisfying etc., for they are really more carnal and futile. In what sense, then?

I think, because those sad stories of falling far identify more vividly with the human condition. Thus, relative to humanity, or in their ability to relate to humanity, they are better. Like how Jesus was “made perfect” through the cross, not in having been imperfect before, but because through the cross his ability to identify with man was established. He got in our shoes, lived Adam’s life, to do what he couldn’t have done otherwise (take Adam’s curse).

In the same way, those who have been redeemed from great sin can say, “I have been there. I know what it’s like.” And unredeemed humanity will only trust an emissary who has shared in their woes. He who wishes to be the emissary of God’s grace must powerfully experience his own fall and redemption first, for only in both tasting the lingering bitterness of his wickedness and savoring the sweetness of God’s grace can he become, as our Lord did, the son of God and the son of man, able to stand in the gap between heaven and earth.

How am I doing? Have I forgotten the depths of the sin from which God saved me? Are my days spent mingling with a world in need of rescue, or cloistered away from the sick in the chambers of the few healthy who know Christ? May I love to tell the mortifying story of me without Christ, so my friends at every turn might see the gracious acts of God through my life. May God make my bad story good.

“Just be who you are”

Sometimes, the most hateful thing you could say to someone is, “Just be yourself.” Sometimes, the most despicably unconcerned and unfeeling thing you can do to someone is “just accept them for who they are.” Yet, at another time, this is the best, most freeing message in the world.

We humans are in a bad way. Read the poets or watch a great movie, and you will see humans lamenting evil. Evil from the natural world, evil men, our own weak and self-inclined hearts. Evil besets us and endangers us, within and without. Things are not all right in the world.

There are some who, in an ill-placed hope, say that we are all okay. We were all born this way, and there need be no path to paradise, because we’re in it. All we have to do to get to paradise is wake up and realize that we’re already there. Evil is simply thinking that there is evil. “Just love yourself the way you are.” This is like a happy doctor who tells all his patients to just stop worrying about that blood they’re coughing up. Granted there are some people who have been imprisoned by false fear and depression, and their rescue is in believing that “it’s okay,” but this is not the answer to the human condition in general. No, bad things are the reality we have to deal with. Those who say “all is well” when all is not well are hurting their audience.

When the Netherlands broadcasted that the Nazi invasion was containable, 24 hours before it fell, Corrie Tenboom recalls her father turning off the radio and saying in uncharacteristic anger, “It is wrong to give the people false hope.” He was right.

But there is a true hope.

God has made away for humans to escape the human condition. To be forgiven the evils they have caused, and rescued from those they have suffered. He subsumed all sin onto Himself on the cross, in the person of Jesus, who made himself a human so that he could receive the blow of divine justice onto himself, and then rose from the dead, so that those covered by his substitutionary sacrifice might be rescued from their sinful bodies and minds, and purified by his spirit into the likeness of his children, and received home to heaven one day by the gate he opened in his descent to Earth. There is an unending life, a home, a family, a peace. We were made for it. And those who declare the name of Jesus do not a disservice, but a great service to humanity. For in the name of Jesus, by grasping onto him by faith as our hope, it can be said that “We are okay just as we are.” Nothing we could ever do would make us more acceptable in the eyes of God, because he sees on us the precious name of his Son, who has claimed us as his own. We cannot and needn’t do anything more than receive with joy, and place our trust all the more in our Rescuer.

So “just be yourself”, without the good news of Christ, is false and evil advice. But, if this advice is received with the message of Christianity, in light of the unconditional grace of God who transforms us by faith in Jesus into beloved and accepted children, themselves endowed with the unceasing longing to love God, then just being who you are opens new doors of freedom and joy. God loves you, period.

Where then is our hope? It makes us who we are.

Josiah came too late

2 Kings 23:24-27
Moreover, Josiah put away the mediums and the necromancers and the household gods and the idols and all the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, that he might establish the words of the law that were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in the house of the LORD. Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.

Still the LORD did not turn from the burning of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. And the LORD said, “I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel, and I will cast off this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there.”

Sometimes repentance comes too late, and the hammer of the consequences of sin must yet fall.

I killed a girl

I killed a girl last year. But I’m not sorry.

She was trespassing on my property, uninvited. I own 10 wooded acres on the outskirts of town, and I have the perimeter clearly marked with “No Trespassing” signs.

She was one of those orphans that have been wandering the streets and living under bridges ever since the orphanage burned down last year. Filthy little creatures. They’re so covered in mud that you can barely tell they’re human. They don’t talk, they just stare at you. They stalk decent people, and steal from our garbage, and sometimes our pantries. I heard Mrs. McCullough found a half dozen of them living behind her garage last winter, taking food from her dogs. The little things disgust me. Their matted hair, riddled with bald patches and welts.

I had taken precautions, you know. When I left my property, I always wore proper protection. A big hooded cloak, that is, so the children couldn’t get a look at my face, and follow me home. It’s always better if you don’t make eye contact.

I had a right to kill her. You can’t deny that she was intruding onto private property. The law says I have a right to defend what’s rightfully mine, and I had the signs posted. It doesn’t matter that she couldn’t read. That is of no consequence. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

After all, she was threatening to interfere with my lifestyle. She was looking at me with those haunting eyes, and I knew I was beginning to feel obligated to let her sleep inside. Then I’d have to clean her up. And feed her. She wouldn’t have left. Before long I’d practically have to take care of her like a daughter. Then what?

It’s expensive, that’s what. I wouldn’t be able to take my yearly trip to Cancun. And Mrs. McCullough and the neighbors think it’s disgraceful to let one of those creatures crawl around your house. Janet felt all benevolent right after the orphanage burned, and now look at her—house overrun by a dozen of them. Cooking for them, cleaning them, teaching them. She never leaves that filthy house. No, I’m not ready to have a kid, and I won’t have one forced on me. That’s why I had to kill her quick, while my head was clear, and I could make the decision that was right for me.

Janet says those orphans have a “right to life.” She says killing children is wrong. But I don’t like the way she puts it. I don’t think they’re really “children”—I mean, they don’t have names or families. They don’t even communicate, they just stare. Maybe they don’t even think. They’re entirely helpless and unable to contribute to society. I prefer to call them “potential children,” or just “hominids,” because their emaciated bodies only vaguely resemble proper children. To be a real child, you have to be wanted.

Come to think of it, maybe not even “hominids,” because I am a passionate member of PETA, and I would object to the killing of an orangutang on my property. (An orangutang wouldn’t threaten my lifestyle.) So maybe the potential girl was just more of a “thing.” Yes. I didn’t really “kill” then – I just removed an unwanted thing.

And I didn’t even do the removing myself. I had a doctor remove it. He went out to where she—sorry, it—was hiding, behind the shed, and suctioned its brains out. It was a clean procedure, and I didn’t even see it at all, once it was dead.

Sometimes I get these flashbacks of its eyes. I shouldn’t have looked at it for so long before I called the doctor. That was a mistake. That’s why I wear proper protection when I’m in town. But I did see them. And its eyes make me wonder. If I had let her stay on my property, could I have raised her to be a real child? Maybe I could have fed her, and taught her to be a lady. Maybe she could have had a name. Maybe she would have been good for me.

No. I don’t think about that. I’m happy with my life. Those thoughts just make me feel some sort of pang in my heart, like I made a mistake. I told myself I wouldn’t go there anymore. Never mind.

I’m not sorry that I—had it removed. I’m fine.

A riddle

I am the first thing you see in getting up,
and the last thing you see in sleeping.
I am in the middle of every fight, but I keep silent.
I am essential to language, but I am not expressed in words.
Some say that I am the biggest part of God,
but I do not claim a part in divinity.
Who am I?

God kicks butt and takes names

Okay, so every time I read this story my jaw drops. Let me retell it.

Hezekiah is anointed king of Judah after Israel has already split in half, and the other half has been invaded, conquered, and deported to Assyria. Judah is the “remnant” that retains independence. Hezekiah is one of the very rare kings who is said to walk completely in the way of David his Father – he destroys the idols in the land and also tears down the high places, which had long been overlooked. Basically, God gives him a thumbs up.

Then, Assyria licks its lips for Judah. Sennacherib sends emissaries who show up in front of the gates of Israel and laugh at them. “Do you think you can stand against Assyria? He has already wiped out all these other nations and their little gods. What makes you think your god will fair any better?”

Soon the king of Assyria shows up with an army of ~200,000 men – huge for this age. They encamp near Jerusalem, and it looks like they are going to lay siege. The emissaries come back out, and this time they offer for the men on the walls to come out and join them. “You will be spared and you’ll be given property if you come over. Otherwise you’re doomed to eat your own dung and starve inside those walls.” Sennacherib sends a threatening letter to the king, belittling their hope and insulting YHWH.

That turns out to be a very bad move. Hezekiah’s servants tear their clothes (a sign of intense remorse) and show the king the letter. He runs to the temple and lays the letter before the altar, praying to the Lord, “God, hear and act! Sennacherib defeated all those other idols because they were wood and stone. Help us, so that the world will see you are God alone!”

Then Isaiah sends word to the king, “God says that he heard the prayer you prayed.” (Cool that Isaiah didn’t know that the king had prayed, but God obviously did.) “Don’t worry, Assyria will not raise a single siege machine against Jerusalem.” God addresses in Assyria in a poem: “I know how you have conquered all the nations as if they were paralyzed. Nice job, playa – that was my doing. I have watched you, and how you have raged against me and hated me. So now I’m going to put a bit in your mouth, a hook in your cheek, and send you back where you came from. Foo.”

And for Judah he makes this promise and prophecy: “For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the LORD will do this.” That statement is loaded with hope and fire, the prophetic assurance that God is eternally zealous to preserve his children through tribulation.

Then comes the craziest part. God sends a destroying angel that kills 185,000 Assyrians in one night. Sweeping epidemic in the camp. The survivors wake up to find everyone is stiff and dead. So they go whimpering back to Assyria and they never mess with Judah again.

Bam! God doesn’t mess around. He is love and mercy, but “The Lord is a warrior” (Exodus 15). If this story is true, then the limits to how he will defend his honor and the honor of his children are far beyond what we conservatively estimate them to be. God is valiant. He really is omnipotent. Like Hezekiah, let us have desperate and presumptuous faith in Him. Let us cast ourselves at the altar. And let us have a holy reverence and fear too. He ain’t playin.

Originality

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
– C. S. Lewis

“Elohim” as an intensive singular

In Psalm 63:1 we find evidence that Elohim – the word used in Genesis – does not necessarily mean plural, although it is often used to refer to “gods”. It can also be an intensive form of the singular. Here’s how the verse reads in English:

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (ESV)

This sounds redundant. God, you are my God. Duh. But consider the Hebrew.

מִזְמֹור לְדָוִד בִּהְיֹותֹו בְּמִדְבַּר יְהוּדָֽה׃ אֱלֹהִים אֵלִי אַתָּה אֲֽשַׁחֲרֶךָּ צָמְאָה לְךָ נַפְשִׁי כָּמַהּ לְךָ בְשָׂרִי בְּאֶֽרֶץ־צִיָּה וְעָיֵף בְּלִי־מָֽיִם׃

No, I didn’t expect you to read this, but it says “O Elohim, you are my El.” So David is addressing God and then declaring him his personal God, as an act of trust and allegiance. But it does not seem logical (and no one suggests) that David is addressing a pantheon and then homogenizing them into a single entity. “O Gods, you are my god.” So clearly, this context reveals that Elohim can be used as an intensive or augmenting form of the singular name for God, perhaps because of an attitude of reverence. This concordance of the Biblical usage of the word shows more detail.

This means liberal theologians have a hard time indicating that the earliest writers of the Bible were polytheists. It also means that Christians might be a little too hopeful when saying that the use of the word Elohim is by itself a clear evidence for the trinity in the Old Testament. There are many other evidences, but we should emphasize ones that are less questionable.