God Speed

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. – Isaiah 55:8-9

Traveling faster than the speed of light is one of the classic science fiction devices for which we are willing to suspend disbelief.  We need to get humans out to strange planets for strange new adventures, and, of course, traveling through the fictional medium of hyper-space or warp-space has implications for the adventure as well.  The truth is, though, that FTL travel would thoroughly mess up the real world.  It would require a complete revamping of the whole of physics.  Things that make sense and fit the equations now would make sense no longer.  I’m not saying it’s not possible for us to get around the limitation of the speed of light or that wormholes do not exist or whatever.  My point is that it is one thing to imagine that something might be possible without really understanding all the implications of such a radical change to the way we see things working. 

This is also true in relation to God, morality, good and evil.  There are those – and their numbers are legion, who are convinced they can do a better job of “god-ing” than God.  They would have a world without suffering.  They would have a world without killer tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, etc.  Their world would have no place for evil. 

To me, it’s kind of like gravity.  If I’m falling from a ten-story building, I would like for gravity to ease up, but, most of the time, gravity and I are good friends.  Gravity makes us strong and healthy.  I have a very hard time imagining how you could have anything like a human without gravity.  So, too, we think -- following Lennon, it’s easy to imagine a much better world, though all our imaginings are based only on the world that we know.  Just as we can imagine flying like Superman but can’t quite figure out how that works, we cannot figure out how we have a world at all, let alone one that would be “better” than this one. 

In The Once and Future King, T.H. White has Merlyn relate the story of Elisha and Rabbi Jachanan to Wart.  In the story Elisha and the rabbi are put up graciously and hospitably by a poor man and his wife who have only a cow.  When the men get up to leave in the morning, the cow is dead.  The next night, the two travelers are treated rather poorly by a rich miser and end up sleeping in his barn.  Yet, the following morning, Elisha has a section of the miser’s wall repaired for him.  Rabbi Jachanan is perplexed and questions what has happened.  Elisha explains: 

“In regard to the poor man who received us so hospitably,” replied the prophet, “it was decreed that his wife was to die that night, but in reward for his goodness God took the cow instead of the wife.  I repaired the wall of the rich miser because a chest of gold was concealed near the place, and if the miser had repaired the wall himself he would have discovered the treasure.  Say not therefore to the Lord:  What doest thou?  But say in thy heart:  Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?”

I am rather with Wart who still thought it a shame that the cow died, but it is true that some events and troubles serve a greater good which the Lord alone can see and comprehend.  I do not think there will be pain and suffering and loss in heaven, but I doubt that earth can even exist apart from some negative pole that is an essential part of life on this material plane.  We do not have to choose evil.  We do not have to make the world worse, but, there is, perhaps, a limit not only to how much better we can make it but how we make it better.  Someday we might find a way around the speed of light, but the speed of good will remain unbroken.

Prophecy and History

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. – Romans 12:6-8

Some of that seems a little redundant to me.  If your gift is serving, teaching, or exhorting, those are the things you ought to do.  By the way, to exhort means “to urge, advise, or caution urgently; admonish urgently”, according to the dictionary.  When most Protestants, like me, think of preaching, we are thinking of exhorting.  That gives us some insight into what Paul was thinking when he talked about prophecy.

Someone who has the gift of prophecy – and, unlike Dispensationalists, I think that gift is still operational – gets understanding or information or insight in some way other than reading it from a book or from experience or some other natural means.  

 I am not a prophet, and I don’t have a prophetic gift, but I did have this happen one time as I have related in the past.  The one instance that I can point to and say with certainty was a very minor thing, simply telling someone that he was going to receive some books he wanted from an unexpected source.  It was almost astrological in its vagueness and non-specificity, but I was as convinced of the reality of it as if the giver himself had called me and told me what he was going to do.   

I can see where exercising a gift of prophecy would require faith, first in recognizing that the insight was a reflection of reality and not imagination, and, second, in acting or telling someone else to act in accordance with it.   

I think a lot of what has advanced the human race in the last couple of millennia has been as a result of the gift of prophecy.  Insights and inspiration come from somewhere.  Those who believe in naturalistic explanations for everything will argue that inspiration is simply a happy coincidence resulting from re-combinations of existing information.  Thus Shakespeare really is no different than a million monkeys typing; he’s just a lot easier to housebreak.   

There are times when what I would call natural inspiration happens, when we extrapolate from the known or pull in something from another realm of experience to apply to the situation before us in a new way.  We might call that wisdom, but sometimes wisdom surprises me, and the same Apostle who spoke of the gift of prophecy here, speaks of the gift of wisdom in another passage (1 Corinthians 12:8).  If we have the gift of wisdom, we know that not all have it, and it is not as easy as some might think to tell from where it comes. 

What is fairly clear is the purpose of our various gifts:  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (1 Corinthians 12:7).  When we look back over the course of history, we can see where humanity’s direction has changed, sometimes overtly and dramatically, sometimes subtly but no less substantially, by inspiration and by faith.  We live and enjoy the conveniences of modern life and our relative peace, prosperity, and security, I believe, by those manifestations of the Spirit given for the benefit of all. 

I suppose, then, we should not find it all that strange that the antichrist spirit of the world often seeks to gain control of what is beneficial, seeks to take credit for all the good that is done, or, failing in those endeavors, seeks to discredit and even eradicate a conduit of that inspiration.   

I wonder if all of this might be related to why so many of the world’s Nobel Laureates have been Jewish.  I also wonder if it would help explain why Anti-Semitism seems to be so popular from time to time.

When Good Things Happen to Bad People

But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. -- Luke 6:35

This is the verse that precedes some of what I quoted yesterday, and continues the theme of the importance of how we live, act, and even how we think. 

Jesus is speaking, and we note that He, somewhat casually, blows apart a concept that most of us accept without too much thought.  God is not good to good people only.  God is good because He is Good.  He is kind – some translations say, gracious, to the ungrateful and to the evil.  To many of us, that does not seem quite the way it ought to be.  It’s not fair.  Good people should be rewarded. and bad people should be punished. 

Of course, they will be.  Both righteousness and evil carry with them their own appropriate rewards, for, as the Lord goes on to say, the seed we plant determines, inevitably, the harvest we receive.  None of us, though, can blame God  – as I must ashamedly confess I have done – for what our thoughts, our attitudes, and our behavior have yielded.  At the same time, we are all in need of God’s grace.  In light of the perfection of God, the utmost efforts of the best of us are hardly worthy of notice, as, next to Mount Everest, all anthills are approximately the same height.     

That part of it and the idea of salvation by grace, most Christians are able to grasp.  We are all condemned apart from the mercy and longsuffering of the Almighty.  Nevertheless, the natural part of us still may stumble over God’s love for those who are wicked.  We may lose patience with His patience and gentleness.  Yet for God to be other than perfect in His love for each individual would turn out all the lights in the universe.  We would be left alone and hopeless in the dark. 

The Lord offers us this truth as He calls upon us to live by the reality of it.  We must put the same graciousness and kindness to work in our own lives – forgiving, loving, doing good, helping with no expectation of any sort of repayment or of those who benefit being kind or grateful in return.  Very often, people may not even remember that we have done them a good turn.  In this way, we transcend the conventions of doing good and begin to be good. 

It can be a hard thing.  When someone forgets all that you or I have done for them or fails to respond appropriately to the grace of God flowing through us, we may feel hurt and wronged.  Instead of dwelling on it and opening a wound or keeping a wound open, we should think of the forgotten good as something done in secret, to the Lord alone.

Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.  (Matthew 6:2-4)