Things Going On

I will say to the LORD, "My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust" -- Psalm 91:2

The past couple of weeks have been intense with lots of work.  I am taking a few days off with my motorcycle starting tomorrow.  It's time.  I have no reserve left.  But, as I often do, I have been praying and thinking about prayer, how we can make it too hard or too easy.  In one sense, it is a matter of talking to God.  That ought to be easy.

Here is the omniscient God, the Omnipresent.  How does He not hear me?  How do I not talk to Him?  In John 14:20, Jesus says He is in the Father, and we are in Him, and He is in us.  That's intimate.  That is close.  We are intertwined, interwoven into the Divine.  Yet, I sometimes feel as though I am talking to myself, that the heavens are brass.  As the old-timers used to say, my prayers don't get past the ceiling.  A song says, "Prayer is the key to heaven, but faith unlocks the door."  

To pray effectively, we must accept a major premise, an axiom that cannot be proven directly beforehand.  It will also often be denied afterward.  It is this:  And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him (Hebrews 11:6).

That's the hard part of prayer, to maintain that attitude, to continue to trust, to live always in expectancy in the face of time and loss and trouble and heartache.  The ape part of me wants to rise up, thrash and smash, rail and lament, beg and belittle.  

I never want to admit that God knows and I don't.  I can explain some things in retrospect, but even then I don't know.  I have to trust.  I always have to trust.  That's hard for me.  I hope it is easier for others.  Really, the only person I trust is myself.  When I think about it, though, that means I am trusting Adam, who is demonstrated to be Mr. Unreliable.  

So, I have to give that up and be confident in the One who never fails.  Once I get there, prayer is no longer burdensome.  From that position, it is as natural as breathing, and it should be as frequent.  

God Has People

And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.  -- Genesis 15:6

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.  -- Hebrews 11:6

What kind of life pleases God?  What does God want from me?  He wants us to be merciful, kind, and patient with one another, to help one another whenever someone is troubled or in trouble.  If you get right down to it, the horizontal sins listed in the Decalogue relate to taking advantage of our fellow humans, denying them fair treatment, making them suffer, and using them that we might have our way and satisfy our desires at their expense. 

We can train and restrain people to the point that most, most of the time, will adhere to a common set of societal standards.  Even the most militant atheist can hardly argue with the inherent sense of the Golden Rule.  A stoner or a drunk knows that what goes around comes around.  That’s certainly better than the attitude of the criminal, the sociopaths, psychopaths, central bankers, politicians, and other parasites who are convinced that they might as well do whatever they want and that their rights supersede the rights of the marks and the masses. 

As long as people stay fairly close to what we now call traditional values and respect the boundaries of community and courtesy, a nation or a people can manage to get along for a while – even if they are more or less godless like so much of Europe these days.  But as we drift further out, we are more and more likely to go off course.  Anyone can navigate a vessel while the coast is in sight.  Under the clouds on a moonless night far from shore, the only way to get home is to accept the truth your compass shows you.  If you don’t believe it, you will never make it back.  For those who fly airplanes and gradually move up to being instrument-rated, a lack of faith can be even more disastrous.  Planes crash when pilots refuse to believe the evidence of their instruments.

All of our apparent goodness, kindness, long-suffering, mercy, and forgiveness can be quickly forgotten if we do not believe God exists and rewards those who seek Him.  Abraham obeyed God because he believed God.  When we believe God, we trust that He knows what He is doing regardless of our present circumstances, the fears and trepidations of our flesh, the contrary opinions of those around us, or the fashions and fads of the world.     

If we want to please God, if you really want to know what God wants from you and from me, He wants us to believe Him – not so He can be proven right or so there will be a consensus but because He is right.  God is not terribly concerned with the direction of public or popular opinion.  He is not dismayed because the world at large, celebrities, oligarchs, plutocrats, and high society ignore and reject Him.  He asks if you and I trust Him because He loves us and will commune with us, enriching and healing, and bringing peace, insight and understanding by His presence.  God has people – the ones who believe. 

The Deep

Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat.  And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”  And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.”  And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking.  — Luke 5:3-6

Simon engaged in an act of faith.  It is clear from his response that he, the professional fisherman, was not about to believe that he was actually going to catch any fish.  No, Simon was merely humoring a celebrity — for that is what this itinerant rabbi called Jesus was at this point.  Jesus was an engaging teacher associated with some healings and, possibly, a prophet.  But no one much considered Him to be the only-begotten Son of God.  We have seen that His family was not supportive.  His kinfolk in Nazareth had tried to kill Him.  Despite His popularity, or notoriety, Jesus was creating enthusiasm and interest but not much devotion.  Simon, Andrew, James, and John don't know it yet, but they are about to be in on the calling of Christ's first disciples.

Simon Peter demonstrates that faith is not a matter of mental acquiescence.  It is not a matter of reasoning or logic or anything we can grasp in the conscious mind.  Fishing as these men did it was not a sport.  It was a long-practiced and perfected craft.  They fished at night when those denizens of the lake came into the shallows to feed.  They did not put down their nets in deep water but used the net to sweep through the shoals catching the fish between the nets and the shore.  Letting down a net in deep water was a waste of effort.  All you got was a wet net.  

We sometimes fail to give people of biblical times credit for any knowledge or what we think of as modern thought processes.  For example, I can assure you that people in those days knew where babies came from.  They may have told some fantastic stories, legends, and myths, but so do we. 

Abraham and Sarah knew that ninety-year-old women do not get pregnant.  The very idea was laughable to them.  They may not have known all the cellular and molecular biology behind it, but they did breed and tend livestock.  Like the saying goes, "We may be from the country, but we know how the cows come home."  No one who has ever pulled a calf or assisted in lambing or foaling has any illusions about storks.  They also butchered their own meat.  Odds are Abraham knew a lot more about anatomy and which parts do what than the average urban-dwelling 21st Century Schizoid Man.  So, too, in the days of Christ, no one believed in virgin births — not even Mary as evidenced by her stating of the obvious -- "I don't see how that's gonna happen" -- in response to the angelic announcement of her impending conception.  Sexual knowledge did not begin with Dr. Freud or Dr. Ruth or Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.   

If there is a difference between us and people like Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and the Apostles, it is that they were a little less willing to think that they already knew it all, that they somehow had access to all the secrets, that technology made them all geniuses.  These days people who cannot make change from a dollar think they understand Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity because they have heard "E-equals-M-C-squared", or because they have watched "The Big Bang Theory" on television.  Knowing how to use a smart phone does not make one smart.   

As Hebrews 11:1 famously says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."  When we read that chapter in the book of Hebrews, we are struck by how those heroes of faith consistently transcended the limitations of their human understanding in response to His word.  God does not call us to stop thinking logically or reasoning or learning or acquiring material knowledge.  He calls us to go beyond the shallow, conscious mind and plumb the depths.  The "things not seen" refers not just to heaven but to all the treasures and resources of our life that lie below the surface.  Like Simon, if we are going to transcend our current state, we are occasionally going to have to move out of what we know from experience, from what we are taught by the world. 

Interestingly, this is not the only time this same group had this experience with Jesus.  From John 21:1-7, we read: 

After this Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, and he revealed himself in this way.  Simon Peter, Thomas (called the Twin), Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together.  Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.  

Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.  Jesus said to them, “Children, do you have any fish?” They answered him, “No.”  He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in, because of the quantity of fish.  That disciple whom Jesus loved therefore said to Peter, “It is the Lord!”  

I have heard people say that if they had lived in the days of Christ's Incarnation and seen Him raised from the dead, they would "have more faith".  It does not work that way.  Seeing is a function of faith.  Certainly seeing the positive outcome of an act of faith can make us more willing, perhaps, to risk ourselves again.  But an act of faith is an act of faith.  There is just no getting around it.  Without faith it is impossible to please God. 

For three years, Peter and the rest had left their boats and followed Christ.  They had seen Him do all the miracles.  They were witnesses of His death, burial and resurrection.  So Peter says, "Well, I reckon we need to go back to fishin', boys."  I am no different.  I have been transformed by the power of the Blood.  But, after all, a man's got to live.  Jesus reminds them and me and you that "once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia".  It's not that we can't fish any more, it's that we will never fish quite the same way again.  We will always be eying that deep water.  And listening. 

Shop Around

Our God is in heaven and does whatever He pleases — Psalm 115:3

On the first cast, I find this a little disturbing. There is the suggestion of a quake in the solid ground of an orderly, law-abiding universe. We have become too accustomed to republics and democracies, to presidents and prime ministers. Monarchs are old-fashioned, and dictators are accursed. But when we think about it, why shouldn't God do "whatever He pleases"? Doesn't He allow man to do that which is in humanity's power to do? Don't we kill, steal, and destroy when we are big enough and bad enough? Would we deny the same power to God?

In fact, if I understand it correctly, one of the favored arguments of atheists is that God cannot be good — though more likely, He cannot be God, and all powerful, since He does not do what He pleases. I think, rather, God does not do what pleases Mr. Dawkins. And I can assure Mr. Dawkins that if God were to change to please him, He would cease to please me. There is that.

Really, I am quite content with God as He is.

If I were shopping for a deity, I would look for one who knows more than I know. I can see where this is neglected by those who know everything.

One who is compassionate and forgiving is definitely high on the list for me. The perfected among us can skip this one.

I would also look for a divinity that demands the best from me, that challenges me, that calls me to self-sacrifice and to exert myself in righteousness. Otherwise it would be akin to an out-of-shape man hiring a personal trainer to tell him he could relax, have a cookie, and put his feet up for a bit.

I will add that I would prefer a deity who allows me to exercise free will. A deterministic existence doesn't sound like much fun. Naturally, that immediately allows for the existence of evil and suffering which also aren't much fun, but having a choice doesn't make much sense when Baskin-Robbins only has one flavor.

Neither do I find a "god of forces" very appealing. I prefer a Person to the force.

While omnipotence is one of my requirements — and here we are getting back to the opening text — I seriously doubt that I can understand all the implications of a Being who is all-powerful. Though a God with the power to create a material universe can unquestionably do as He pleases, allowing His creatures to operate with free will necessarily creates some boundaries. Yet, apparently, that pleases Him.

I would like a god who is unrivaled. As with an impersonal force, god-by-committee lacks appeal. I have no problem with the Trinity in this regard as there is complete agreement within the godhead.

I would like a deity I could speak to, boldly on occasion, even desperately at times. I would like it a lot if my god were to speak to me as well in some way.

How about one who was tempted in all points as we are and can understand what we go through? That cuts way down on the possible candidates, but it seems quite crucial. And if he can understand me, I'd like to be able to understand him.

Speaking of 'him', I would like my god to be a Father rather than a Mother. This goes back to my point about needing a god to challenge me. Certainly the fatherhood of an omnipotent, omniscient, infinite being can be only an aspect. There has to be feminine aspect as well (how else could he know it all?), but to be acceptable in all circumstances, the masculine has to be — there's no way to say it without it sounding sexist — dominant. That's right. I'm all for strong women, but I don't want Mother to have to be a pushy bitch.

I am tempted to say I want to see my god-by-design. Some would say that they want to see god directly. I suspect that would be the utter end of the material universe. In order to come into His creation, God had to lay aside the "god state" and become a Man. Even so, His people rejected and crucified Him. When, at an earlier time, He allowed them to hear His voice in their natural ears, they begged Him to stop talking. God neat, so to speak, is too strong a potion. His entrance into the world shatters its hold on us.

I am sure, though, the list could be longer. Feel free to add to it. Or take away from it. I am glad the Bible says, 'Without faith it is impossible to please God'.

Cause and Effect

Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen. — Hebrews 11:1

Now without faith it is impossible to please God, the one who draws near to Him must believe that He exists and rewards those who seek Him. — Hebrews 11:6

Do you know the difference between correlation and causation? If you do, you are ahead of most folks, and you're also ahead of many so-called experts.

I made a single mistake in the design of my house. In my office, I have a half-bath, which is fine. If I had made it a three-quarter, with even the simplest shower, I could have avoided exposure to all kinds of evil. For example, the other night I needed a shower, and I had to cross the master bedroom as my wife was watching the day's Oprah re-run. Oprah had some experts on telling people how to increase their wealth (for most Oprah-watchers, getting a job would be a good start). The final suggestion was to buy a house, since, the "expert" claimed, people who own their homes are something like 34 times wealthier than renters. I could not help myself. "That dumbass is no expert if he/she doesn't know the difference between a cause and a correlation!" I exclaimed.

The problem is that what the idiot said is probably actually the case. People who own homes no doubt have more wealth/net-worth than renters. The expert implied — and likely believes — that owning a home causes a person to be wealthier. The truth is that owning a home — for most people — correlates with having more wealth. Right now, there are millions of people who believed in the causation theory living in mortgaged houses that have actually decreased their wealth because they owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth or will be worth in the foreseeable future. There are also a large number of people for whom home ownership is sucking out most of their resources. They were led to believe that owning a home equaled increasing their net-worth, so owning a bigger, more expensive home meant they had more wealth. They are saddled with monthly payments that eat up over half their disposable income, and they are living, not just from paycheck to paycheck, but off their credit cards. Every day they are, as TEF most famously said, "Another day older and deeper in debt."

The confusion is also seen quite often in medical science and probably other branches of science. The false prophets of anthropogenic global warming see the correlation between increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and increasing temperatures and claim that "carbon emissions" cause planetary warming. In fact, increases in CO2 lag increases in temperature, so it could hardly be the cause. Carbon dioxide causes global warming in the same way that the hole in the window caused you to pull the trigger on your BB gun.

Obesity, cholesterol levels, arterial plaque, and heart attacks correlate. I am not convinced that there is a direct cause-effect relationship. I am personally convinced that, for most people, dietary cholesterol does not cause heart attacks or strokes. Rather, it seems plausible to me that obesity itself is an effect instead. Note: I am not offering medical advice to anyone. I'm just saying what I think. I am as completely ignorant and unqualified with regard to medical science and human physiology as I am most other subjects, including finance and politics. I do, however, believe that a reasonable amount of physical activity along with having a vocation or avocation that gives you real joy will cause you to have a healthier and higher quality life, if not a longer life. And what do you really want?

Faith can correlate rather than cause as well. In my work, I often have to come up with solutions to problems. Sometimes, I just know I'm right about a fix or a solution. Other times, I have a little twinge of doubt that tells me all is not as it should be. If I were a name-it-and-claim-it type of faith person, I would try to quell the doubt and strengthen my faith. As it is, I have learned to re-examine my code. The other approach — thinking will make it so — is rooted in a childish mindset of magical thinking. Too often faith is equated with or devolves into such idolatry.

When the Bible talks about the faith of Abraham, it speaks of him "believing God". Isaiah asks, "Who has believed my report?" In Romans 10, Paul explains that the path to salvation is to "believe in your heart". What does the heart believe? The truth. The truth that Christ was raised from the dead. Faith does not cause the truth to be true. Doubt does not mean that Jesus has not been raised. My refusal to believe causes me to miss salvation, but it doesn't make anything untrue. Faith causes me to experience the benefits of the truth. But faith correlates, you might say, with the truth. It would be far more appropriate to say that the truth causes faith on my part. Faith is the result not the cause.

For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves. It is God's gift ... (Ephesians 2:8).

So faith comes from what is heard ... (Romans 10:17)

A Little on Seeing and Believing

Now without faith it is impossible to please God, for the one who draws near Him must believe He exists and rewards those who seek Him. – Hebrews 11:6

For as sight is only seeing, faith is only believing. – Hannah Whitehall Smith

When Thomas doubted the resurrection of the Lord, demanding to see the holes in His hands and the wound in His side, the disciple did not really lack faith. He believed that he had seen Jesus die, which was true. Jesus died. Thomas believed that dead men generally stay dead, which they do. Facts and experience supported Thomas’ faith that his fellow disciples were wrong. The only thing Thomas doubted was the testimony of his best friends, not because they were liars -- for the most part, but because their statements ran counter to what he knew as facts, despite having himself witnessed many events that were inexplicable to him. The others were emotionally distraught. Perhaps he thought one or two of the remaining ten had been hitting the wine a little too hard. John was so young and easily influenced. Peter, well, he may have been overwhelmed by the guilt of his cowardice. Andrew and James were usually pretty stable, but they might just be going along with the crowd.

People have faith. Quite often it’s not called faith. Sometimes it is called consensus. Sometimes it is referred to as “relying on expert opinion”. Sometimes it is called common sense.

You know what, common sense – which in reality is not so common, as Will Rogers long ago observed – has failed many times. Consensus is just going along with the crowd, sometimes for monetary gain. Experts are right almost as often as they are wrong.

We will read horoscopes, play the lottery, draw to an inside straight, listen to economists, meteorologists, and all the little cronkites that read the news on television. Cronkite used to be the most trusted man in America. People had faith in Cronkite, who was about as unbiased and truthful as Bill Clinton at a Jenny Craig meeting. American soldiers did not lose any battles in Vietnam, only the propaganda war on the six o’clock news. Our military has never met defeat on the field in Iraq or Afghanistan. They can only be beaten by the verbal barrage coming from the seditious spawn of Max Headroom contaminating the 24 hour news channels.

I have no faith in them. They are right only because they constantly change their opinions to match the data. A comprehensive list of groups and individuals I don’t believe would be pretty extensive. I am from Missouri. I’d as soon believe the loving affirmations of a crack whore as a publishing professor, a scientist hooked on government grant money, or a politician trolling for votes.

Sometime back my daughter got on the Da Vinci code stuff, and how Constantine had gotten involved with Christianity wanting to use it for his own purposes. Didn’t I think, she asked, that the “real” documents and manuscripts might have gotten corrupted? She was surprised – knowing that I am skeptical and analytical – when I did not even hesitate in saying, No.

You could show me irrefutable proof that the entire New Testament had been written by dolphin-like aliens with opposable thumbs from the Pleiades as a satire of their own religion, and it wouldn’t really make any difference to my acceptance of its revelation. Once a person really believes God, that is, believes that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him, all the other stuff – the biological and historical accidents, the little twists that have to occur to make human life, consciousness, and revelation possible are seen as His work.

Constantine and everyone else are merely the instruments in God’s hand. Through the prophets, the Lord said the same thing about the pagan nations of Assyria and Babylon, about Greece, about the pharaohs of Egypt, and Caesar in Rome. Pick up a modern copy of the Bible, hold it in your hand and think about how it got to you. Even if you consider it in the most humanistic way possible, is it not something of a miracle? If you have a map of the world, or a globe, find the Middle East, look at the word “Israel”. How could such a place exist?

Like sight, faith is only as worthy as its object. To look on squalor and ugliness and horror is to regret the gift of vision. To believe in emptiness, meaninglessness, and the absence of truth is to regret faith – or it should be.

I believe the truth.