Frighteningly consistent

If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:11-13 ESV)

God is faithful: frighteningly consistent. He always takes care of his children…and he takes care of his enemies. Therefore, it behooves us to be faithful to him. Which side will we fall on? He will not move. He is faithful to his Word and Himself, even when we are unfaithful to it. There is no shadow of turning in Him. Is there in me?

Wearing it on our sleeves

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

God told his people to obsess about his words. Israel was to talk about His words everywhere they went, with the bank teller, with their kid when dropping him off at school, at the dinner table, in bed with their spouses. They were to make signs to remind themselves and put them on their doors and gates, and bathroom mirrors, and above their TV’s. They were supposed to wear God’s words on their rings and bracelets and necklaces, and get scripture tattoos, and strap passages of scripture onto their foreheads as if playing one of those “guess which famous character I am” games. They were supposed to make His words priority both publicly and privately, because his words are the wellspring of everything that can refresh the mind, transform the soul from wicked to willing, and fill the empty soul. His words are life and blessing and peace. They are truth, no, they are utter reality. Other things in life are fluff and distraction. The TV show I watched last night is but a vapor, but the scripture I can barely seem to focus on this morning, that is everything.

God, give us the grace to obsess about, delight in, and soak in your scripture. May the Word consume us as we consume his words.

Respecting vicarious authority

What should our thinking be toward government? We should remember that we are always citizens of the Kingdom of God before we are citizens of any nation (and it if comes to it, we must disobey in order to keep the faith). However, given that, we ought to submit to government, not resisting, protesting, and causing dissension. Paul writes to the Romans:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. (Romans 13:1-2)

Some authorities, including government, are instituted by God, and carry his own authority vicariously. We are told to respect authorities, because by doing so, since they are the extension of God’s authority, we are in fact respecting God Himself. There is a parallel between the thinking here and that written in Matthew 25. People are commended on the final judgment for helping Jesus when he was sick, naked, and hungry. They ask, “Lord, we when did we do this? We don’t remember it. We’ve never actually met you…” The King’s reply:

‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

Because those poor people represented the recipients through which those people could demonstrate mercy, God counted them as merciful and tender-hearted even to Himself. In the same way, when we obey government, we are obeying God, who has established them as the stewards of his authority. Of course, there are limits to this, because governments can be abusive. The Bible also says, “There is a time for war,” and that includes war against an oppressive government, but that does not justify the cynical government-bashing, boss-bashing, and father-bashing that are so rampant in our culture. The Christian’s default mode should be one of reverence and respect for those whom God has appointed. We should remember that our political leaders, our fathers, our husbands, and whoever else is over us, have God to answer to, and us to answer for; it is not our job to hold them accountable. God has appointed them, and he still rules them, and will exercise his purposes through them. He is the King of Kings. By honoring Kings, we show our faith in their King.

Wheat and weeds

Jesus tells us the story of the wheat and the tares. A farmer sows wheat into a field, but his enemy comes by night and sows weeds (tares) too. When the plants sprout, the farmer’s servants say, “Master, didn’t you sow wheat? There are tares too.” The farmer says, “It must have been my enemy!” The servants ask if he wants them to root up the tares, but he replies, “No, because you’d uproot some of the wheat too. Leave it all until harvest time, then you can harvest the tares and the wheat separately.”

We are all seeds in the process of becoming full-grown souls. Many philosophers say that the point of hardship is the forging of virtue, that life’s hard journey is about proving, and even creating, our love for God and man. Becoming people ready for the glories of heaven is a process that takes until our last breath. God is our potter, and the point of our justification before him is more the beginning than the end. He shapes us relentlessly into saints. But the opposite is also true: the man who has rejected God spends his life fortifying against the truth, constructing self-defenses and self-justifications. With each act of the selfish or lustful heart, the heart becomes darker still.

But the things that proceed from the mouth come from the heart, and those defile a man. – Matthew 15:18

It is a vicious cycle. When we are done on earth, our deeds and decisions will have crafted to perfection that character that once lay only nascent in our hearts, whether good or evil. Then our true colors will show in the court of the great judge.

Even a child makes himself known by his acts, by whether his conduct is pure and upright. – Proverbs 20:11

We will have become who we are becoming. Our identity will be consumate. When our souls are full-grown, God will judge us and divide good from evil.

Wheat and weeds have no ability to change, to veer off from their inevitable maturation. But the glorious and fearful gift of being human is that, ever since Adam and Eve, we have had the choice to believe what we want, whether God’s word or lies, and consequently to become who we want to be. So, who am I becoming? Who do I want to be? Let me act today toward becoming a full-grown son of the kingdom of God.

“Love is love, and family is family”

Last night I saw a TV preview for a new show by the producers of Glee. The show, The New Normal, features a grandmother, mother and daughter, and a gay couple. The mother needs money to support her daughter’s future, and the men, who want a family of their own, are paying to have her be their surrogate. The grandmother seems more morally traditional and has problems with the gay couple, which are ridiculed as outdated and “racist” by a woman in the preview. One pivotal line of the preview is when the gay men ask the mother if she’s really okay with having the baby for them. She responds with a smile, “Love is love, and family is family.”

Let’s unpack that statement. It’s a tautology, a statement that is circular in reasoning and is thus always true under any possible circumstances. Often, tautologies are simply meaningless. For example, Polonious’ line in Hamlet, “Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” Another fun example is the following limerick:

There once was a fellow from Perth
Who was born on the day of his birth.
He got married, they say,
On his wife’s wedding day,
And he died when he quitted the earth.

Although tautologies are often quite uninformative, they can be used to imply another meaning quite effectively. For example, “I’ll get there when I get there,” is used to challenge someone who is hurrying the speaker to arrive somewhere faster. “It is what it is” is used to calm someone who is unhappy with the way things are going. And “I am who I am” communicates that I cannot change, usually when a change in my behavior has been suggested. Therefore, tautology can be a rhetorical device that defuses expectations or outside influences on the meaning of a phrase by defining the phrase with itself.

Now let’s go back to the statement “Love is love” for a moment. What the mother was saying to the gay man is, “I am okay with your homosexual love, because no outside influences have the right to impose their definitions or expectations on what you have with your husband, and belie its being called love. Nothing defines love except love itself.”

Nothing defines love except love. It is self-existent. Is that true? For those that espouse belief in YHWH, the God of the Bible, it is not. Love is defined not as a self-existent phenomenon or experience, but by Him.

God is love. (1 John 4:8)

If God defines love, then what he says about it matters. Suffice it to say, for now, that God’s message throughout the Bible is pretty clear that love, in the romantic (eros) sense, is reserved for the protected santcum of marriage.

Which takes us to the second statement: “Family is family”. Is family as good as it can get in whatever form it may take? Is family a self-existent self-affirming bond that can happen between any people? In a sense of the word, yes, “family” simply means the people you are committed to in phileo love, who you do life with. I think of the 90’s sitcom Full House, where widowed father Danny Tanner enlists his brother-in-law and his best friend to help raise his three daughters. Close, unique family bonds of love existed in that house. But that’s not the sense of “family” that The New Normal means; the show is grasping for more ground with the word. It’s talking about a core family, the kind that blossoms crucially from marriage and eros love. In fact, I believe we could use “marriage” as a synonym for what they mean. The woman says to the gay man, in essence, “I am okay with your homosexual family (marriage), because no outside influences have the right to impose their definitions and expectations on the kind of relationship you have with your partner. Whenever two people decide to be family, they are lawfully family, because nothing defines family except family itself.”

Nothing defines family except the people in the family. “Two mutually consenting adults.” Is this true? Not if you believe in the God of the Bible. The family/marriage was instituted by God and defined by Him.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him… And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18-24)

When two people enter marriage, they enter a state designed and instituted by God. In the Garden of Eden, God designed woman especially for man. Indeed, God brought the woman to the man Himself. “Therefore a man shall leave…” means that the enduring human institution of marriage is based on this act of God in the Garden. God created family between a man and a woman, for special purposes, not only for compatibility and complementation, but also for reproduction (which cannot be naturally replicated by other adaptations of the family), and beyond even that, for the analogous manifestation of his love-relationship to his people, the Church (Ephesians 5:22-33). God Himself “joins together” what no man can separate (Matthew 19:4-9). God is intimately involved in this union; it does not just have to do with two willing partners.

So, are the ideals of love and family subject to any outside definition? We are faced with a choice: Either we submit our definitions of love and family to God, believing him to be the wellspring of wisdom, whose laws are for our good, or we submit God to our definitions of love and family, making love and family ultimate, making them good and right whenever the heart invokes them. “God [according to concept of him that is compatible with my interests] would never say something like that. He wants us all to be happy.”

What then will reign in our hearts with the self-evident force of tautology? For my part, I prefer to say with joy, “God is God, and his definitions are his definitions.”

Sincerity is not always salvation

From the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England:

XVIII. Of obtaining eternal Salvation only by the Name of Christ.

They also are to be had accursed that presume to say, That every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, [provided] that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law, and the light of Nature. For holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved.

Mere stewards of power

King Zedekiah is trapped Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzer’s armies surround them. There are only three fortified cites left in all of Judah, and they are all under siege. The prophet Jeremiah has sent word to the king that he will certainly be conquered and deported to Babylon, although he will live. Zedekiah sends a message to all those in Jerusalem, “Release all of your male and female slaves. Every Jew is to be a free man now. We’re all in the same boat, we must stand together against the enemy.” The citizens set their slaves free…then, when the attention of the king’s soldiers has passed, they secretly re-conscript their slaves.

God if furious. He sends another message through Jeremiah, “This is just like you sons of Israel. I told you in the law that you were to release your brothers who have become your slaves every seven years. Each slave will be paid for seven years’ worth of work, and set free at then end of the term. But you never did this, and even when your own freedom is on the verge of disappearing you remain stubborn. So if you will not proclaim a release for them, I am proclaiming a release for you: a release to famine, sword, and pestilence, until everyone gawks at your pitiful plight.” (See Jeremiah 34.)

And the Jews were conquered, and lost their autonomy for centuries.

Part of the fear of God is respect for fellow man. None of us is property, we are equal because we are equally sons and servants of the same Father and King. In God’s kingdom of the freed, there is some room for a hierarchy of function (if done in love) but not a hierarchy of ultimate value. Yet when one man gets power over another, it becomes hard for him to relinquish it willingly.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul says:

The time has been shortened, brethren, so that…those who buy [should be] as if they did not possess, and those who use the world, as if they did not make full use of it, for the form of this world is passing away.”

Just as the last days of Israel’s freedom compelled Zedekiah to think lightly of servanthood, so we who are in the last days, awaiting as with trimmed lamps the imminent arrival of the Lord, ought to think lightly of the servant and master roles in our cultures. Employers, your rights over your employees are fleeting; honor them. Employees, remember that only the Lord owns you; give Him the firstfruits of your energies. Do not fear man, nor strive to be feared by him. The time has been shortened, and both the rulers and the ruled will soon stand on level ground before the Judgement Seat. It is best that we remember, while putting our utmost into our work (whether leader or follower), that the productivity of our business is of little eventual importance, but the people with whom we do business are God’s beloved.

Lead graciously, and serve willingly, because we are the mere stewards of any power we exercise over our fellow man, and the true King is coming soon.

Gender in the Bible

What exactly defines one’s gender and sexuality? There are a lot of things I would consider masculine or feminine, that aren’t associated the same way in other cultures. More importantly, what is the part beneath the cultural variability that matters to God? How does one’s sexual orientation please or displease God? Here are a few scriptures that discuss them overtly, interestingly the same ones usually examined when studying marriage (I bet the passages below are the most quoted at weddings). These verses, however, show that God is quite invested in the distinction between male and female.

Genesis 1:27–28: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

Genesis 2:23–24. When the woman is created from his side, the man exclaims: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Matthew 19:4-6: Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

Ephesians 5: 24-32: Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . . . 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

We are made, male and female, “in God’s image.” We are designed to “become one flesh” and never separated. And this mystery, Paul says, has reflected Christ and the church since the beginning of Creation. In the mingling of a man and woman we get a picture of God’s relationship to us. What it means to be masculine, essentially, is to reflect the relationship that Christ has to the Church. Conversely, femininity is reflecting the role that the Church plays in its relationship to Christ. Gender roles are not about how much hair you have and where. They are not about whether women can wear pants or men can wear skirts (think of the Scots). We can’t hang our hat on any one cultural standard. Fulfilling these roles might look quite different between situations or cultures. (I take it the women chopped wood among the native Americans.) But there is something less specific, but much more profound, real, and significant to the male/female dichotomy. There is a duality at the core of the nature of humanity, and God says he created it so that we would get a clue about what it’s like to relate to him. From the beginning, God designed masculinity and femininity.

But we live in the aftermath of the Great Corruption that occurred after the divine definitions of gender given in Genesis 1 and 2. Our perceptions and intuitions of God’s order are distorted or forgotten (and where they are remembered, resented). Our hearts are governed by passions fixed on objects they were never intended for, because we have lost sight of the Great One who, in being our chief passion, aligns all the rest. Homosexuality is not disease, but a symptom. The disease is that the world groans in an unnatural state of rebellion against God. Our feelings deceive us. In this rebel state our hearts are drawn toward things they should not desire, and repulsed by things they should. To those who say that we should accept gays the way they are, I ask if they gave the same philosophy to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “That’s just the way the weather cycles go. We have to embrace them.” If it is true that our world is not as it once was — as it should be — then could human sexuality not be part of that which was changed for the worse?

Am I willing to submit every aspect of my current natural self to Christ so that he could do in me a divine work of transformation? Do I cling to my passions and inclinations as my personal property? Am I willing to trust him that his plan for sexuality is the best? Or do I believe that, because I am one way now, that must God’s best for me? But God loves us too much to leave us as we are.

“Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ,’ to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.” — C.S. Lewis

I will give them a heart

I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart. Jeremiah 24:7

Lord, I pray this be true of me! I cannot strengthen and shape my own heart toward you. “The heart is deceitful above all things, who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). So come do your own work in me, Lord. Turn your potter’s hand toward me and make me a triumphant display of your creative genius (Jeremiah 18:6). Kneed my heart until it is pliable. Give me a heart to know that you are the Lord and to return to you every day, lips to claim you as my God in renewed commitment and hope with each morning, be it a clear sunrise or obscured by clouds. Have me, work in my heart, 24:7!

Getting cleaned up

When a believer is “sanctified” by God – a process that begins at the moment of justification and continues until his glorification in heaven – he is said to be “set apart.” That’s the connotation in Greek. Reserved, pulled aside, for a special purpose. Imagine you are a rare silver dollar from the 1800s, and some man finds you in his coin bowl. What is he going to do? He will clean you up, removing the tarnish and scum, and then he will put you in a display box to show you off to his house guests. Your worth is hundreds of times more than $1, so he will set you apart. That’s the way it is when, in Christ, we become the infinitely valuable children of God. He begins the cleaning process which will end in our being displayed for his glory and honor.

The same is true for the girl who has pity on a dog at the pound and takes him home. When her mercy and sympathy has chosen to rescue that untrained, unruly puppy, she gives him a bath, trains him to obey, and not to pee in the house. She puts him through the uncomfortable rigors of domestication so that he can live the more fulfilling life as part of a family, instead of being stuck at the pound.

Do you feel like you’re being scrubbed by life’s steel wool? Has God got you sitting in some abrasive acid? Something painful that you don’t know how to handle? Are you unsure that his intentions for you remain entirely benevolent? Only through suffering can we be refined into the children of God that he has planned for us to be. The only way to sit at the table of the Wedding Feast one day is to share with Christ in his sufferings, in cleansing from sin and galvanizing our faith through fire.