Tactical Suffering

And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. -- Mark 8:32

The fuller exchange between Peter and the Lord is found in Matthew 16, but Mark gives us the idea.  Recently, after yet more senseless murders, a newspaper headline declared that God would not fix our problems.  Others mocked and ridiculed those who offered prayers for the victims and their families after the attack.  Man always thinks he can tell God how to do things.  Blind, ignorant, and corrupt politicians know better how to run the world than the God who created it.  Many, if not most, anti-God arguments start from the assumption that what a particular person or culture considers good also constrains God. 

Napoleon was a master of maneuver warfare because he could almost instinctively grasp the strategic points of the ground on which the battle would be fought.  The soldiers sent forward to capture a particular position might not have understood the significance of what they did or failed to do.  All they knew was the blood and horror of the battle around them.  They braved the enemy’s fire or they failed to advance.  The individual knew only the risks of his own situation.  He could not see, especially during the battle, the part it played in the grand strategy of his general.  His line might be the feint, or it might be the main attack.  He might be the pawn sacrificed to draw the enemy away or he might the hammer which crushed the opposing force.     

I don’t think we have all that much understanding of how the world really works.  I think we are arrogant in our ignorance.  We have developed some cool technology and some interesting toys over the last hundred years or so, but we are fools if we think we can control the forces of nature or that we comprehend the mysteries of the universe or of our own existence.  Shakespeare is a lot closer to the truth than the science popularizers, the academics, Keynesian economists, and such:  There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

It doesn’t mean we should not strive or learn or that we can’t ever know some things.  It means that we ought to humbly acknowledge with Browning, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”  The modern and the post-modern have eliminated heaven, and we know the agonies and destruction wrought to bring about their childish utopias of nihilistic hopelessness. 

No one in this world is ever going to eliminate suffering and evil or so much as explain why they have to exist.   Atheists can’t explain it any more than Buddhists, Muslims, or Christians.  The day after some horrific event, disaster, or excruciating personal loss, we all, regardless of philosophical view or religious faith, have to get up and make it until the end.  The difference is not in what I know but who I know.  God knows, and I trust Him. 

Rules of Engagement

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men -- Mark 7:8

Much of religion is little more than a way for truth to be compromised, and human thinking to be justified.  When people talk about how God told them to do this or that, we ought to listen carefully for what those people are going to get out of it.  The “will of Allah” or the “will of God” too often become political tools for manipulating and controlling a group or a nation. 

Jesus never called His disciples to political revolution.  He did not come to overthrow the Roman government or to establish a particular form of government.  When He quoted Isaiah 61 in the synagogue (Luke 4:18-19), the good news He was proclaiming to the poor was not income redistribution or Marxist class struggle. The captives He came to liberate were not those in physical chains.  He came to set all of us free from the bondage of sin, from the prison of distorted perspectives, and from the vanities and illusions of a merely material existence. 

Christianity can work and has worked in every imaginable political system.  It has been nice to have had the opportunity to live in a prosperous, mostly free-market economy, to have enjoyed the benefits of political and religious liberty and the enlightenment and innovation it brings.  But it isn’t necessary. 

To be a Christian means being filled with the life of Christ, to walk in humility, meekness, kindness, and love.  The Romans led those First Century followers of Christ out into the Coliseum to be tortured, humiliated and killed.  Tyrants of all kinds – some calling themselves Christians as well, have oppressed believers and sought to defeat the Truth across nearly twenty centuries since.    

I am not a prophet, but I can read the writing on the wall.  The western world has shredded, squandered and disavowed its Christian heritage.  Our political leaders, intellectuals, and media idols call good evil and evil good.  The seeds have been sown and sprouted.  The stalk has reached full height, matured and ripened.  The reaping is at hand.  A whole lot of people are going to get exactly what they want, and they are not going to like it at all. 

Regardless of the way the world goes, the commandments of God are the same.  I am to love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love my neighbor as myself.  I am to take up my cross daily and die to self.  I am to give no place to selfishness, self-justification, or pride.  If I am called to lay down my life, I am to do it joyously.  I think I can do this.  The Lord has never asked me to do anything that I couldn’t do. 

One more thing, though, that those who despise and mock Christians sometimes fail to grasp.  When I say that I have to love my neighbor as myself, it means all my neighbors, especially the weak, the innocent, and the helpless.  I am obligated to protect them as much as I can for as long as I can by whatever means necessary.      

Work It On Out

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.  -- Philippians 2:12-13

The paradox here is the same seen in the hypostatic union of Christ.  How can the Lord be fully man and yet fully God?  How can I work out my own salvation when it is God who both wills and works in me?

First, it might be helpful to understand what hypostatic means.  It was used to refer to the divine nature shared by the Father and the Son, as in Hebrews 1:3, where Jesus is called the exact or “express image” of God.  There is one nature.  As it came to be used in reference to Christ it meant the union of the two natures of God and man in the single person of Jesus. 

We, too, have two natures, the old and the new.  We possess the inheritance of the first Adam with which we are born, fallen and corruptible.  Through faith, we step into and operate by the nature of the Second Adam with liberty and life everlasting. 

I once had a Muslim ask me how the “Great God” could become a man.  The better question is how we would ever connect with a God who did not know us, who had not brought God and man together in one glorious person. 

The resolution to the paradox of Philippians 2:13 is that it all depends on God.   And it all depends on me.  There is no part that I play -- nothing that I finish out after God starts it, or vice-versa.  It's not teamwork as we usually understand it.  Everything is my responsibility.  Yet it is all God’s doing in me. 

Strange Dreams

[A]nd the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. -- Ecclesiastes 12:7

I have this thought that somewhere two beings walk side by side and talk.  One says to the other, “Sometimes I seem to remember as in a dream a body made of dust in which my thoughts ran wild and I did fear its dissolution.  And I fed it, too, the dust of beasts and things that grew in the dust and watered it that it might hold together yet be pliable, as clay.” 

The second being laughs.  “Who can imagine from where dreams come?”

The conscious mind is rather like a pool on a cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  You could swim laps from San Francisco to Tokyo but it’s not going to affect your destination or the speed with which you arrive.  There is a lot going on with your ship that has nothing to do with the pool. 

My life has a destination whether I am fully aware of it or not.  I have a purpose whether I know it or not.  Faith knows that God is at the helm.  Some people are in a rowboat in the pool and are rowing desperately to get to where they think they want to go and are shocked when they end up somewhere else. 

I recall reading a science fiction story about a huge space ship that had begun a multi-generational voyage to an earth-like planet orbiting a star many light years distant.  Generations would live and die in the ship on the way to their destination.  Eventually, the original purpose of the ship was mostly forgotten.  After centuries, the ship was the universe to its inhabitants.  Someone on board stumbles across the truth, but it is regarded as a myth.  The ability to navigate had been lost, though it could be regained from documents found on the upper levels of the vessel.  Those who rose up to re-establish the mission were killed, the records were destroyed, and the ship wandered aimlessly on through the void. 

It sounds a lot like hell.

Transformers

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. -- Titus 3:4-7

Normally I ignore a lot of stuff I see on the Fakebook, but recently someone I know posted a picture of a church sign that said, “God prefers kind atheists over hateful Christians.” 

I have no doubt that many atheists are better people than I can ever be.  God certainly doesn’t love me more than those good atheists.  He also doesn’t love me less.  Does He prefer that I be kind rather than cruel?  He does.  That’s why we are about to celebrate the Incarnation, the time in history when God became Man and walked among us all the way to Calvary.  He came to deliver me from my cruelty and my hatred, my lust and my greed – to deliver me from death. 

Do Christians sin?  We certainly do, and when we do, we often call into question the value of our faith.  We cause the world to wonder what difference there is between Christians and non-Christians.  Christ came not to improve our lives but to give us life.  Even the kindest, most generous, most forgiving atheist is still dead in his or her trespasses and sins.  Is that fair?  Yes, it is. 

You see, we have all “sinned and come short” of the glory of God.  We have all missed the mark in life, and the reason for that is that we are all here in a fallen state.  Our sins and errors are not the cause of our fallen state but the result.  So, too, when Christ comes into the heart of a person, the good works that begin to flow out of that individual are not a cause of salvation but the result of it.    

Jesus came to show us who we are and to offer to us – all of us – His righteousness.  The people for whom the gentle and loving Lord Jesus reserved the most ire were the self-righteous, those who thought that they were doing pretty well on their own.  They didn’t lie, steal, cheat, kill, or mistreat in a physical way.  They just looked down on others, demeaned and derided the “publicans and sinners” around them.  They were quick to find fault and to judge.  Now, as it happened, those were “religious” people – mostly Pharisees – to whom Jesus spoke.  He words, though, are applicable to anyone with the same attitude of pride and self-justification.   

The world into which the Son of God was born was a religious world.  We live in a secular world, though one clearly enabled and enlightened by Christianity.  Our modern-day Pharisees are politicians, academics, celebrities, journalists, etc,, who think themselves more “advanced” than the rest of us and feel the need to help us out of our superstitions.  I understand that, and it doesn’t really bother me. 

What bothers me is the person who put up that sign.  It was, as I said, a church sign, no doubt put up by a church member, someone on the staff, perhaps at the pastor’s request.  The idea, I suppose, was to shame the church members into being nicer people.  That is wrong.  It is a perversion of the gospel, a form of the “social gospel” bullshit that crippled 19^th and 20^th century Christianity.  Jesus Christ did not die on a Roman cross for nice people.  He did not rise triumphant over death, hell, and the grave to make us nice. 

He came, He died, He rose again to make us sons and daughters of the Most High God, to deliver us from the delusions of the world, the illusions of temptation and the old, sinful nature, to bear away the penalty and power of our sins, release us from bondage and make us the righteousness of God in Him.  He came not to conform or reform but to transform. 

Caterpillars are not interested in being nice, kind caterpillars.  They are born to be butterflies and to soar.