Author: Ben Taylor

A grim view of human nature

The scriptures don’t speak too kindly of human nature. In fact, they’re downright insulting. A bit too pessimistic and severe to suit the humanist. Or good-natured, old-fashioned-respectful American-dream-living folks. Listen to Paul’s intense claims in Romans Chapter 3:

For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:

“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

The Remedy is the righteousness of God through faith.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.

 Pessimism toward man is the prerequisite to optimism toward Christ.

Baptism as a symbol

I was recently visiting a church where the pastor, during the baptism ceremony, repeatedly emphasized the importance of the heart-decision to follow Christ and deemphasized the importance of the baptism ceremony. “What’s happening here is just a symbol,” he kept saying. I agree. But in my study of symbols in communication (an excellent slice of communication theory) I learned of the inseparable interaction that occurs between the symbol and the thing signified–they are symbionts that together establish meaning and create reality. There’s a lot of weight in a symbol. Especially a sacramental symbol modeled by Christ Himself. I found a great excerpt from Piper on this:

“Sometimes we refer to baptism as a symbol. That may be saying too little, unless we remember that there are two ways to symbolize something. If you write the word LOVE on a blackboard for a group of 2nd graders and say that is the English language symbol for a commitment of the heart to someone’s welfare, that’s one kind of symbolism. But if you take your girlfriend out to a lagoon and sitting with her under a tree you pull a diamond ring out of your pocket and ask her to marry you and offer the ring as a of your love, then you are doing something very different—you are expressing love through a symbolic action. The teacher who writes LOVE on the board need not have any love. But the giving of a diamond ring is love in action.

Baptism is a symbol of faith in that second sense. It is an expression with the whole body of the heart’s acceptance of Christ’s lordship. Why is this so fitting that Jesus commanded it of all his people? I think it is fitting because what happens in becoming a Christian involves the body as well as the heart. In conversion the heart is freed from sin to be enslaved to God. But in Romans 6, Paul really stresses that our bodies too are involved in this change over. For example, verse 13: ‘Do not yield the members of your body to sin as instruments of wickedness but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments of righteousness.’ It seems fitting that since the lordship of Christ lays claim to our whole body, we should express our acceptance of that lordship with an action of the whole body.”

Some excellent punnishment

What’s the definition of a will? (It’s a dead giveaway).
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
A backwards poet writes inverse.
In democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.
She had a boyfriend with a wooden leg, but she broke it off.
With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.
Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I’ll show you A-flat minor.
When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered.
A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
You feel stuck with your debt if you can’t budge it.
He often broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.
Every calendar’s days are numbered.
A lot of money is tainted. It taint yours and it taint mine.
A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.
A plateau is a high form of flattery.
The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.
When an actress saw her first strands of gray hair she thought she’d dye.
Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.
Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.
Marathon runners with bad footwear suffer the agony of defeat.

I selected these from “Know Pun Intended” by jardMail. Much thanks to Kristen for bringing these to my attention.

The un-purpose-driven life

The following are some pieces of My Utmost for His Highest regarding the pursuit of God’s purposes, which might make Mr. Warren mad.

August 3
‘Naturally, our ambitions are our own; in the Christian life we have no aim of our own. …We are not taken up into conscious agreement with God’s purpose, we are taken up into god’s purpose without any consciousness at all. We have no conception of what God is aiming at, and as we go on it gets more and more vague. God’s aim looks like missing the mark because we are too short-sighted to see what He is aiming at. At the beginning of the Christian life we have our own ideas as to what God’s purpose is–“I am meant to go here or there,” “God has called me to do this special work”; and we go and do the thing, and still the big compelling of God remains. The work we do is of no account, it is so much scaffolding compared with the big compelling of God.’

August 4
‘He can do nothing with the man who thinks that he is of use to God. As Christians we are not out for our own cause at all, we are out for the cause of God, which can never be our cause. We do not know what God is after, but we have to maintain our relationship with Him whatever happens. We must never allow anything to injure our relationship with God; if it does get injured we must take time and get it put right. The main thing about Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the atmosphere produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to look after, and it is the one thing that is constantly assailed.’

August 5
‘It cannot be stated what the call of God is to, because His call is to be in comradeship with Himself for His own purposes…. If we are in communion with God and recognize that He is taking us into His purposes, we shall no longer try to find out what His purposes are. As we go on in the Christian life it gets simpler, because we are less inclined to say–Now why did God allow this or that? Behind the whole thing lies the compelling of God. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.” A Christian is one who trusts the wits and the wisdom of God, and not his own wits. If we have a purpose of our own, it destroys the simplicity and the leisureliness which ought to characterize the children of God.’

Amen, Mr. Chambers. When I try to determine what God wants from me, it almost inevitably becomes an attempt to control my own life (in a nice Christian way). It is the hardest thing for me to quit grabbing for the road map and just let the Spirit of Christ be my guide. I have no say in my direction, I can’t even plan or prepare myself. But I must trust that the Lord will both communicate to me when I must turn or speed up or slow, and also prepare me adequately to pass through the thing into which he thus leads me.

The Christian life has no purpose, so to speak.

We are not driven by goals, we are not driven to any foreseeable end. We have only a great Means to whatever ends He wills. And we know that His ultimate end is simply Himself. Humble, doting dependence is our place. We cling to the Lord’s leg like a tenacious toddler, and he does the walking.

I must live a Spirit-driven life; and the Spirit has His purposes.

Beautiful passages from Isaiah 33

O LORD, be gracious to us; we wait for you.
Be our arm every morning,
our salvation in the time of trouble.
[A sweet plea for God to hold us up]

The sinners in Zion are afraid;
trembling has seized the godless:
“Who among us can dwell with the consuming fire?
Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?”
[God’s holiness- for he himself is a consuming fire]

He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly,
who despises the gain of oppressions,
who shakes his hands, lest they hold a bribe,
who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed
and shuts his eyes from looking on evil,
[A holy life- who can say they have done this, and exempted himself from the consuming fire of God’s holiness?]

he will dwell on the heights;
his place of defense will be the fortresses of rocks;
his bread will be given him; his water will be sure.
Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty;
they will see a land that stretches afar.
[Paradise- beholding the King in his beauty, and green hills, like Gandalf said]

For the LORD is our judge; the LORD is our lawgiver;
the LORD is our king; he will save us.
And no inhabitant will say, “I am sick”;
the people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity.
[God himself will work holiness for us, and he is our whole government- all three branches- on that day. Halleluiah!]

A beautiful passage from Isaiah 30

For thus the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, has said,
“In repentance and rest you will be saved,
In quietness and trust is your strength.”

The repose of a baby on his mother’s breast is the dependence that becomes faith.

But you were not willing,
And you said, “No, for we will flee on horses,”
Therefore you shall flee!
“And we will ride on swift horses,”

“I don’t think God’s going to show- it’s too late- we have to take matters into our own hands.”
That thought was the downfall of the first king of Israel.

Therefore those who pursue you shall be swift.
One thousand will flee at the threat of one man;
You will flee at the threat of five,
Until you are left as a flag on a mountain top
And as a signal on a hill.

The sign waves sadly on the barren barrow, a sorry solitary vestige of those who fell to fear.

Therefore the LORD longs to be gracious to you,
And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you
For the LORD is a God of justice;
How blessed are all those who long for Him.

He is peering over the lip of heaven, bursting with expectancy for someone to finally return the anxious longing he has for their union with him.

On abraham’s sacrifice

Here is a good take on how God, who abhorred child sacrifices, could demand a child sacrifice of Abraham, excerpted from Timothy Keller’s Counterfeit Gods:

We can only understand God’s command to Abraham against the cultural background of ancient times. The Bible repeatedly states that, because of the Israelites’ sinfulness, the lives of their firstborn are automatically forfeit, though they might be redeemed through regular sacrifice, or through service at the tabernacle among the Levites or through a ransom payment to the tabernacle and priests. When God brought judgment on Egypt for enslaving the Israelites, his ultimate punishment was taking the lives of their firstborn. Their firstborns’ lives were forfeit, because of the sins of the families and the nation. Why? The firstborn son was the family. So when God told the Israelites that the firstborn’s life belonged to him unless ransomed, he was saying in the most vivid way possible in those cultures that every family on earth owed a debt to eternal justice–the debt of sin.

All this is crucial for interpreting God’s directive to Abraham. If Abraham had heard a voice sounding like God’s saying, “Get up and kill Sarah,” Abraham would probably never have done it. He would have rightly assumed that he was hallucinating, for God would not ask him to do something that clearly contradicted everything he had ever said about justice and righteousness. But when God stated that his only son’s life was forfeit, that was not an irrational, contradictory statement to him. Notice, God was not asking him to walk over into Isaac’s tent and just murder him. He asked him to make a burnt offering. He was calling in Abraham’s debt. His son was going to die for the sins of the family.

The convergence and divergence of Islam and Christianity

Theological Similarities

We both believe in a transcendent, incompletely comprehensible God who is beyond space and time which he created, and who gives meaning to reality. We are made for him.

We believe in a terrifying Day of Judgment when the everyone will be judged according to the deeds he has done on earth, both good and bad.

We believe in an enemy of man, Shaitan or Satan, who is actively trying to entice men to sin and disbelief in God.

We believe in the spirit world and in the significant influence of good and bad spirits.

We share theological conundrums such as the Problem of Evil, Free Will and Determinism, and the challenge of hermeneutics and interpretation of our scripture.

We both value balance and eschew oversimplified black-and-whiteness on issues.

We both emphasize charity, generosity, hospitality, community, family, morality, temperance, prudence, modesty, integrity, and love for God and man.

We believe that God determines everything that happens, both good and evil, pleasurable and painful. He uses everything according to his higher purpose: to bring us to the point where we yield our trust and hope to him.

We believe God chooses based on his divine right to whom he will grant mercy and to whom he will not.

We believe that since God controls all outcomes, the role and responsibility of man is that of his intentions or decisions. He wants us to choose to him. The choices of our hearts throughout life define us and our outcome on the Day of Judgment.

We call men to this choice of God, but we admit that their obedience to God’s commandments is insufficient, no matter how valiant our effort. We know that deeds are a futile attempt to please God and thus we depend on his mercy.

The Worldview of Islam

Islam, or submission, implies harmony and peace deriving from the proper order of things. It’s being who one is supposed to be.

Man begins good, but the world and Shaitan corrupt him inevitably—every man chooses to disobey God.

The solution to this is to repent from sin and obey the revealed will of the Creator, operating in grateful worship, concordance with his statutes, and humble dependence on him.

This is accomplished by:

  • recognizing the One True God for who he is (tawheed)
  • acknowledging God’s sovereignty in your everyday life
  • obeying his commandments (most essentially the five pillars)
  • avoiding sins

Because he cannot perfectly avoid sin and obey God, one’s hope to receive God’s mercy is on the basis of sincere intention of the heart. In other words: doing the best he can possibly do to obey God’s commandments out of a humble, grateful desire to please God, keeping his motivations purged of selfish ambition, desire to manipulate God for your benefit, or secret hesitation, as much as he is able.

Repentance is paramount—God loves repentance more than no repentance with no sin in the first place. Repentance is rooted in humility and gratitude, the two legs of sincerity.

There is no guarantee that one will be accepted by God; however, God is very merciful, and according to one hadith, on the Day of Judgment he will give 99 times the mercy that he has given over the whole history of the earth.

If one’s good deeds outweigh his bad deeds on the day of judgment, God is likely to admit him to paradise.

If one’s bad deeds outweigh his good deeds, he will be put into hellfire for a short or long time based on God’s divine will and the severity of his sins, until they are paid for by suffering.

All but the most corrupt of the corrupt, who have never had the slightest inkling of belief in God, will eventually enter paradise.

Christians Say We’re Much Worse Off

One’s intentions will never will be as sincere as they must be to please God.

One’s good deeds must not weigh out to be 51% or greater, but rather 100%, because:

The judgment for a single sin is more severe that the most torturous prison sentence –it is the death penalty. The slightest imperfection is absolutely and permanently separated from God.

God’s self-imposed justice binds him from passing over unrequited sin.

The Christian Solution (The Heartbeat of Our Faith)

God must have payment for sin.

  • The only way he can transfer this payment without violating his justice is to receive an equal value in a form agreed upon by the plaintiff (God). No natural man can pay for another man’s sin, because all of mankind is the defendant.
  • Thus God took it upon himself to pay the penalty—“separation from God” (i.e. himself)
  • He made part of himself man and cut that part off (separated him) from the rest of himself for an eternal instant, which he (accurately) deemed equal or greater in value.

Jesus Christ is that part of God made manifest.

Man benefits from this by believing fully that Jesus Christ is the only hope for his justification before God (similar to how Muslims believe the shahaddah) who was truly sent from God and ordained by God as the only chosen method of escape.

Those who believe that God himself paid for their sins through the Jesus Christ, and entrust their hope and their life to him, are covered by his wing on the Day of Judgment. And anything or anyone not covered by God’s wing on the Day of Judgment will receive permanent requital.

The lion’s pit (a parable)

In an old kingdom there once was a man who was convicted of murdering a woman. The man was a wealthy man, and requested that bail be set, but, because of the seriousness of the crime, the king ruled that there should be neither payment nor parole, and ruled that the convict was to suffer capital punishment by being cast into the den of a hungry lion.

The man’s best friend, who was as close to him as a brother, stood up in the back of the court and cried out, “Please, O King, let me be thrown into the pit instead of him!”

But the king refused, saying, “This man must bear his own penalty, according to his own deeds. It is not fitting to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free.”

The friend replied, “At least let me be thrown into the pit also.” The king dismissed the proposition, but when the friend would not stop crying out and begging to be thrown in, he relented and said, “If you wish to die needlessly, so be it.”

So the man and his friend were thrown into the pit, and the lion awoke and approached hungrily. But the man’s friend stood in front of him, and as the lion lunged to attack him, thrust a sharp shard of rock up into the lion’s throat. The friend fell, torn to pieces by the angry throes of the lion, but then, moments later, the lion died also.

Many witnesses saw this, and, being moved by the sacrifice of the friend, and seeing that the lion was dead and could no longer kill the man, they called for the man be set free from the pit. But the prosecutor disagreed, saying, “The blood is still on his hands, he must still die.” The king replied, “You agreed to the sentence. His penalty was to be thrown to the lion, and thrown to the lion he was. Let him remain until morning, and then his sentence is passed.”

This is why I believe in Christianity: We all are destined for the pit, for the wages of sin is death. He who has hated his brother has murdered him, and he who has looked on a woman with lust has committed adultery (Matthew 5). Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins (Leviticus 17:11), and the payment shall be life for a life (Deuteronomy 19:21). But Jesus, who is fully God and fully man, has rescued us from death. He became man to enter into the pit with us, because only a man could meet death. He was and had to have been God, because only God could defeat death.

[Told at the Fawakih Program 2010, edited 2016]