The Seen and the Unseen

By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.  -- Hebrews 11:3

Work has been taking an unusual amount of time lately.  Perhaps I am slower than I used to be.  Anyway, I have let some things go, including the blog.  I have been doing more and maybe thinking less.  I’m not sure that’s altogether a bad thing.  One thing I have been thinking about is faith. 

What we believe has implications.  If we believe that Jesus is the Christ, that He is the only begotten Son of God sent, not to condemn the world but to save it, this tells us something about the nature of the cosmos and our place in it.  This means that we are not merely clever animals, that reason and logic work because we live in a reasonable universe running according to mathematically intelligible laws, that it was created by a Mind of which ours is the image and likeness.

Faith in Christ means that we believe God is love and that He is Good.  That, in turn, means that love and good rule over all.  It means that we cannot lose by doing the will of God or by loving our neighbor.  If we do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8), no matter what circumstances we face, no matter how horrible, frightening, and unfair life may seem in the short term, we will be all right in the end. 

This is the choice we have:  to live by faith or to live by what is seen.  We can live by the standards of the world system for the world’s approval to get the most out of our short and -- sometimes, nasty and brutal existence on this planet.  The reward for that, regardless of how good we are at it, is death.   Conversely, we can choose to reject the world and its standards and live by the truth revealed in Christ.  This may result in mockery, scorn, and ridicule from those around us.  In some times and places, it results in actual persecution, abuse, torture and death. 

What is important to remember is that the people of faith are not the ones breaking the rules.  It is the world that is constantly forced to reform and revise in the face of reality.  The world plays its game and lives in its delusion as long as it can until the fragile shell of lies is shattered and it must seek refuse in a new one.  There are moments in history, in between the dreams, where truth asserts itself and all cling to it as to a rock in a raging sea.  This point in history is not one of those, but it may be soon.

The Band Played On

The former things I declared of old; they went out from my mouth and I announced them; then suddenly I did them and they came to pass.  Because I know that you are obstinate, and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead brass, I declared them to you from of old, before they came to pass I announced them to you, lest you should say, ‘My idol did them, my carved image and my metal image commanded them.’

You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it?  From this time forth I announce to you new things, hidden things that you have not known.  They are created now, not long ago; before today you have never heard of them, lest you should say, ‘Behold, I knew them.’  

You have never heard, you have never known, from of old your ear has not been opened.  For I knew that you would surely deal  treacherously, and that from before birth you were called a rebel.  – Isaiah 48:3-8

The words of the patriarchs, of Moses and the prophets that followed undermined the denials of idolaters, scorners, and skeptics.  Things do not just happen.  As Rick said over on One Cosmos, it seems like a setup because, in a way, it is.  Certainly God can step into someone’s life – e.g., Saul of Tarsus – and take over because a particular person or situation is needed for a course correction.  Yet, if Saul had remained obstinate in the face of seeing the Lord, if he had insisted that he had gotten hold of some bad mushrooms, he could have.  But the Lord knew that he would not. 

You don’t have to be God or have a locked down deterministic universe to predict how your spouse or one of your kids or your best friend will react in a certain situation.  How hard do we think it is for the omnipotent, omniscient Creator of heaven and earth to figure out how to get something done?  God can deal with our free will and our individual choices. 

In His dealing with Israel, going all the way back to Abraham, we see God speaking beforehand.  We might think of it as the Lord establishing His credentials, proving time and again that He and He alone is the Real Thing.  If we look at the narrative flow going through the Law and the Prophets, we can see the winnowing that takes place from Abraham to Christ.  God did indeed make of Abraham a great nation in order to isolate one line and, ultimately, one single little girl in order to bring about the salvation of all humanity. 

I’m editing the MOTT chapter on “The Force” which is timely for Christmas since it deals primarily with virginity and the Virgin Mary.  Even if some of us might think that Roman Catholicism goes too far in veneration of the Blessed Virgin, Protestantism doesn’t go far enough.  What a supremely wondrous person Mary must be, and must have been prior to her acceptance of that destiny.  

Think of the millions who lived and died between the single points of Abraham and Mary, one opening out to myriad possibilities only to narrow, refine, and fine-tune back down to one individual strand.  We can see God as the Composer of a vast, complex symphony, every note and movement set down and meticulously charted from the all-seeing, all-knowing perspective of eternity. 

I see Him more as the Master Composer who also conducts and plays – you know, Three in One --  knowing where He wants the music to go, knowing the themes, able to incorporate discords and faults into the ultimate beauty of this glorious composition.  Now, I am no musician and know nothing about music beyond playing, very poorly, a few chords on a guitar.  But if I did play some instrument really well and understood music composition and all that, I might be able to jam with the band. 

Well, that’s what life is.  It’s not that hard to find out the general way we are supposed to play it – do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.  We can find our niche and tune up to fit in with the current movement, to play according to the grace that has been given us.  We study the Word, we pray, we give God space and control in our lives that He may use our obedience to counter and correct the disharmonies of those who go their own way and play their own sad tunes.  Maybe they will hear at last our Ode to Joy and decide to join the band.   

 

Test Anxiety

You are good and do good; teach me your statutes. -- Psalms 119:68

Psalm 119 is an acrostic poem, each stanza using the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet to begin each verse.  There is a tradition that says David wrote this Psalm as a means of teach his son Solomon the spiritual alphabet.  It is both the longest psalm and the longest chapter in the Christian Bible, having, alone, more verses than some entire books.  The constraints of the structure -- though no doubt losing much in the translation to English, still manage to give Psalm 119 a unique timbre.  It is a prayer, like many of the Psalms, but -- like the Proverbs, its focus leans toward the inculcation of wisdom with the purpose of transformation. 

Like Micah chapter 6 and verse 8, the 68^th verse of the Psalm manages to encapsulate a vast panorama of life and religion.  God is good.  He does good.  What He does is good.   This goodness in character and action can be realized by man – by His grace.  When Charles Spurgeon commented on this verse, he pointed out that God’s goodness is active and purposeful.  God means to transform us and even to perfect us.  The psalmist confirms our sense of this world as a place of instruction, development, and growth.    

Thinking about it in this way, we can understand that there is a choice to be made.  We can choose to be negative and resentful of tribulations and afflictions, or we can see them as signposts and lessons to move us in the right direction.   

Sometimes things get written up in Scripture that are purposefully indirect.  Paul talked about his “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).  We do not know what that might have been, though it is often speculated upon.  By being a little vague on the details, the Holy Spirit enables us to identify with the concept and accept our own humbling flaw – be it spiritual, physical, or psychological – as a thorn in the flesh as well.  We see how Paul dealt with his affliction – submission and acceptance after repeatedly asking in faith that he might have relief – and deal with our own problem the same way.

Elsewhere, we read:  And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.  And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.  So, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas (Acts 16:6-8).   

I know that Paul and the other Apostles often heard from God fairly directly by dreams and visions, but I wonder about the means the Spirit used to direct these men to the particular town of Troas.  What happened such that, writing some years later, Luke could conclude that they had been “forbidden by the Holy Spirit”?  There is no mention here of a more direct revelation – though the vision known as the Macedonian Call is recorded in the very next verses.  Perhaps they were guided by impressions or maybe they just did not “feel right” about going a particular direction.  Maybe they received a prophetic word as Paul later heard from the prophet Agabus (Acts 21:10-11).

Any of those things are possible, but so too would be a course correction born of contrary circumstances, hostile encounters, physical hindrances, missed connections, or any other affliction that necessitated a change in direction.   For Paul and his traveling companions it meant going to Troas and across the straits to Europe rather than to Bithynia.  For us, it may mean a different job or career path than we had expected or a change in attitude or lifestyle. 

For most of us wisdom is not going to come from sitting comfortably in a comfortable room waiting for a nice dinner.  Transformation may happen in a cocoon but only after the caterpillar has consumed a lot of experiences and developed to the point where the cocoon can be created.  Right now God is teaching you and me His statutes.  All this crap that we are experiencing is infusing us with wisdom – if we are willing to receive it – and developing us to the point where metamorphoses can take place.  The grave is, of course, the ultimate (as best we know now) cocoon from which the butterfly may emerge in resplendent glory, but we have the potential for moving through stages within this life.  These transformations may not be objectively discernible or particularly radical.  That does not mean, though, that they are minor or insignificant.  When it comes to final exams, some of us probably just brushed up and reviewed while others crammed.  If you think about life’s final in the same way, a lot of stuff we see happening in and to ourselves and others might take on a different hue.         

The light of revelation does not illuminate all of the details in our path.  Its focus is upon the end -- perhaps it would be better to say that it originates from the end, splashing light back along our road home.  The shadows cast on this side of much that we encounter are deep and impenetrable, but the other side is well-lit.  The course is much easier to understand in the clarity of retrospection.  Sometimes, as we struggle with our shadows and mysteries, we must act with only a small lamp of faith in the darkness.   

God is good, always.  God does good, invariably.   We can pass this test.

The Problem of Evil

Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip; for the day of their calamity is at hand, and their doom comes swiftly.’ — Deuteronomy 32:35

Nearly thirty years ago I met a teenage boy, we'll call him B., outside a high school gym.  My initial reaction to him was visceral and not so much irrational as extra-rational.  I remember seeing black beetles crawling out of a hole where someone's family pet had been buried.  I felt the same unease I experienced upon meeting B.  For a time, he became involved in the lives of people I knew.  I didn't like his smirk and would have wiped it off his face, except, as he blatantly told another adult, "I'm under-age.  You can't touch me."  He brought pain to several people I cared about over a period of a couple of years then, mercifully, dropped off our screens — for about ten years.

B. could be a charming person, a natural-born salesman — some said.  To me, he was dishonest, always wearing a mask, a manipulator.  Other people were pawns to be moved at his whim on a board that only he could see.  He was clearly very clever and thought himself brilliant, though he never did well in school.  He seemed to prefer to fail from not trying rather than have try and find that he was merely above average.  Bankrolled by hard-working, thrifty parents, he went off to college in another state where he spent most of his time seducing girls and using the drugs he peddled. 

Eventually he made his way back to his old stomping grounds, picked up a job selling cars, and happened to run into a girl he had known in high school — one of his rare failed conquests.  I had been involved with the girl's family at the time and my warnings may have helped keep her out of his clutches.  I wasn't around when he came back. 

B. harbored a particular animosity toward me.  He was too good at his game to express it openly and certainly too cowardly to brace me or anyone else since his protected juvenile status had evaporated.  I am not egotistical enough to think that he targeted the girl just to get back at me.  She was attractive enough on her own.   Nevertheless, he did seem to relish the fact that he could rub his conquest in the faces of those, including me, who had thwarted his designs.  I suppose I should credit him with showing some responsibility when he married the girl after getting her pregnant, but I thought she would have been better off without his noble gesture.  In my less charitable moments, I thought marriage just gave him more control over the girl and of their child when she was born.  It also gave him a chance to milk more money from his parents who were thrilled to at last have a grandchild.  The marriages of their two older sons had not produced any offspring.  The baby was welcomed. 

B.'s ways did not change.  He could not keep a job.  He continued to manipulate people, to do drugs, to run with his friends.  It was common for B., out in public, to point out a good-looking woman for an unfavorable comparison to his wife.  He flaunted his infidelities and physically abused his wife when she objected then shamed her into covering the bruises.  When someone noticed a nasty set of bruises on her legs, the woman passed it off as a side-effect of the medicine she took for high blood pressure.  It was like watching a made-for-TV movie.  I could not believe that, in the '90s, women would still do such things.

After about four years, the young woman got up her courage, partly out of concern for her daughter, and left him.  Her mistake was not going far enough.  B. went to church and had a dramatic conversion.  He met me on the road a day or so later and shared the story of his "Damascus Road" experience.  I slammed him down between seats of his car, and, with my hand on his throat so as to slow his lies, I snarled, "If I had killed you when you were fifteen, I'd be out of prison by now." 

I was a little surprised that he did not have me arrested, but there were no witnesses, and B. knew that his most effective revenge would be to win his way back into his wife's good graces and continue to destroy her life, which is pretty much what he did.   The truth was that my reaction was more an expression of my utter impotence than anything else.  I raged because, in the end, it was not my business.   I could not, short of actually twisting his head off, effectively intervene.  It had to come down to the girl seeing through him. 

It took B. a year or so, but he wormed his way back into her life and her house.  Nothing changed except that he had made himself unwelcomed at most of the dealerships in the area and so was reduced to selling office equipment and supplies as a cover for his drug deals.  The bills were paid by his wife.  Any money he got, he blew on himself. 

At some point, he began to abuse his daughter.  Whether she knew or suspected or simply feared what was going on, his wife kicked him out of the house again and went through with the divorce this time.  But, with his parents' support and money, B. got regular visitation.  The abuse continued. 

As might be expected, what the young woman had suffered had a negative impact on her life.  She began to fall apart, all the more rapidly because she could not protect her child.  People labeled her as crazy.  Desperate for money, she stole from her employer.  Mercifully, she only lost her job and her house.  Her daughter, now a twelve-year-old and still wetting the bed, had to move in with her father and his new girlfriend. 

The little girl made the best of it.  She made friends with another girl at school and invited her to the house for a sleep-over.  Again, this sounds like something from a bad television script, but it is true.  B. drugged his girlfriend and slipped some kind of sleeping medication to the two girls.  Apparently his dosage was too light, and when he attempted to molest his daughter's friend, she woke up and pushed him away.  The girl and her mother brought charges against B., but a jury let him off.  That was three years ago. 

B.'s ex-wife got her life back on track, got her daughter back with her, and found a new job.  She still hated and feared B., but he was more or less out of her life.  Then, one night last week, the police arrived at her house.  They had been told that B. had made threats against her and her daughter as well as a number of other people.  A manhunt had been initiated for B., now a man in his forties.  He was accused of breaking into a house and raping a teenage girl at gunpoint while her parents were away.  Late the next day, B. was taken into custody.  He gave up without resistance, though he was armed, a coward to the end. 

Right now, he sits in a jail cell somewhere.  He will not be released on bond.  He will likely spend most if not all the rest of his life in prison.  His parents know the truth.   The jury that turned him loose three years ago knows the truth.  This is not the first rape he has committed.  I pray that it will be the last.  When the news came, my first thought was not that justice had finally been done.  Oddly the very first thought went back to the image of his smirking face outside the gym door.  A line of victims seemed to stand in the shadows behind him, like ghosts from the future.  A list of his atrocities appears on the wall as if written by the finger of God.  All I had to do was shove him back against the wall and slit his throat.  Yes, I would have suffered.  But see how many would have been spared.

This is the problem of evil at its most personal.  This is how I feel when I hear the names of the dead and wounded from Aurora, Colorado.  Why couldn't I have acted on my instinct?  I was right about B. in that very first meeting before I even knew his accursed name.  I have been right for thirty years.  Even that day on the road, if I had choked the life out of him then, I could have prevented this last rape and at least one other along with the abuse of his daughter, not to mention a dozen or more other crimes against God and man.   

The answer lies near here, I think.  These kinds of attacks on decency and righteousness, acts of perversion and defilement are offenses first against God.  The wrath of man, or of a man, as James says, does not produce the righteousness God requires (James 1:19-20).  In other words, it was never my business.  If I had indeed killed B. when he was fifteen, his daughter would never have been born.  Some person might be in the world instead of her.  She, despite the evil of her father, despite her own suffering, is a good person, kind, caring, and selfless.  I might have a faint idea of the suffering my action could have prevented, but what of the evil my rashness might have unleashed?  Could I see the ghost of that?  We do not know and cannot know what shores the ripples of our actions might wash. 

Here in the shadowlands the best choice will ever be to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God. 

Frodo:  What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!"

Gandalf:  "Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."

Frodo:  "He deserves death."

Gandalf:  "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. ..."

A Hard Row to Hoe

For thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and Jerusalem:  “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.  Circumcise yourselves to the Lord; remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; lest my wrath go forth like fire, and burn with none to quench it, because of the evil of your deeds.” — Jeremiah 4:3-4

The old-timers had a phrase that puzzled me as they spoke of "heart-felt religion".  On Sundays in church, the preacher would ask, so it seemed to me, if we believed in Jesus.  The historical reality of Jesus as a human is not debatable.  The same kinds of records attesting to the reality of most historical figures confirm that Jesus lived and walked the earth of Galilee and Judea during the first 30 years or so of the First Century.  Both the New Testament and documents from observers of the times such as Josephus agree that Jesus of Nazareth is not some cultish composite but a man with that name, lineage, and reputation.  You either believe that or you don't.  The other issue is whether one believes that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, as He appears in the Gospels to claim, or if He was merely an enlightened teacher who got caught up in a political struggle.  There are, again, ample reasons to believe that He was the Son of God, for otherwise, based on His claims as recorded, as Lewis has so deftly explained, we are forced to believe He was a mad man or an evil and deceptive charlatan.  It is possible to dispute the New Testament accounts, of course, but one is subsequently left wondering how a dozen ignorant peasants in a backwater province started the Church.

Intellectual belief was not hard for me, but the "heart-felt" part left me baffled.  I believed what was written in Scripture, but the call seemed to be demanding something else, something that would transform me into another person.  Agreeing with a confession of faith is good, but it's just like signing a contract.  Anybody can do that and adhere to the restrictions or requirements.  So I thought.  If I had been brought up in a more orthodox tradition, either Catholicism or Orthodoxy, I would have been baptized into the Church.  Eventually I would have been offered full communion via an initiation — a somewhat more mystical path.  But the Protestant tradition rejects this idea and calls upon those who can be accountable and responsible for themselves to, as individuals, enter into communion by a public confession, of which baptism is a part.  The closest a protestant comes to mysticism is the going under and coming up out of the water a new creation. 

Everyone generally agrees that being a Christian is more than mental acknowledgement of some fact — as James says, "Even the demons believe — and shudder."  Jesus Himself speaks of being born again or born from above then says, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." 

In another place, explaining the heart of the Law and what is pleasing to God, Jesus replied, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’  The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)  One of our favorite quotations is Micah 6:8, He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

Love is not a mental assent but, we often say, an emotion, a feeling, or, to use Jonathan Edwards term, an affection.  We are to love the Lord, not merely follow His decrees.  Neither is doing kind or merciful things sufficient, but we are required to "love" mercy.   So, too, humility is not a mental state, but a state of the heart, as we might put it.  Holy affections are as necessary for our walk with God as our adherence to correct doctrine or our obedience.  In fact, obedience without love is nothing.  Does Jesus not say that many who call Him 'Lord' are unknown to Him?  My wife might be happy that I buy her flowers, but if I were to tell her that I only did it because it was the right thing to do and that I really could care less about her one way or the other, she would be much less impressed.

When we talk about feelings, a lot of us think of bodily responses to emotions.  Fear might cause us to sweat profusely.  Embarrassment causes the blood vessels in our faces to dilate.  Anger might cause our muscles to tense up.  Somatic reactions to emotions are not the emotions themselves.  We may cry when we are sad, but sometimes we don't.  We can be so stricken with grief that tears, if they come at all, will appear only after the shock of a sorrow has worn off.  I always said that aside from embarrassment and anger, I didn't have much range in my emotional responses.  It would be unwise, then, to base an assessment of anyone's affections on their emotional response. 

This was the reason Edwards wrote Religious Affections.  During the Great Awakening revivals that began, more or less, as a result of Edwards' preaching, there were often emotional manifestations, not unlike those that used to be seen frequently in "holy roller" meetings.  In the 1990s, in the so-called "Toronto Revival" at the Airport Vineyard Church, people had bizarre experiences, often "laughing in the Spirit".   Similar things occurred in the "Pensacola Revival" and in Steve Gray's church at Smithton, Missouri.  People flocked to these meetings, especially those with Pentecostal and Charismatic backgrounds, many of them ministers, in order "experience" revival.

In my opinion, most of it was and is a form of mass hysteria or pretense.  There are true holy affections that are part of a genuine conversion to Christian faith.  People may tremble.  They may sob.  They may faint.  They might become incoherent or experience glossolalia.  They may even laugh.  They may feel like dancing or running.  But in the end, as Paul says, the spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet.   Outbursts that are disruptive or distracting can be held in check.   I went to a few meetings — once intentionally and a few other times inadvertently — where this kind of behavior was exhibited.  I don't know that some people were not positively motivated by this manifestations.  I know a few people that were involved that I trust and respect who seemed to benefit from them.  I still think they were victims of a form of mob psychology, but it didn't hurt them. 

It did hurt me.  What I saw was the pretense, disgraceful displays of fleshly excess, willful stupidity masquerading as piety, arrogance, and foolishness.  I closed myself off to all of it when what I should have done was weep for the idiots and the suckers being pulled into it — even for the fools perpetrating their theater of the absurd.  Prior wounds in churches may have made me more defensive and less understanding.  The whoring after attention and self-promotion sickened me — which would have been fine.  What was not fine was that I hardened my heart against all things related to church and Christianity.  I mocked and ridiculed and unleashed my natural cynic. A hardened heart, like trampled ground, is unfruitful no matter how fertile the underlying soil might be.  My life became barren, and I became indifferent to everything that mattered. 

I cannot by an effort of will turn indifference into love.  I can, however, plow under the hard ground of my heart, through prayer and meditating on Scripture and focusing on the Cross.   A merciful God can then cause me to shed that indifference, to love what He loves and to hate what He hates.  Vulnerability means we get hurt easily, but it also allows us to be sensitive to what God is saying and doing, to be more susceptible to conviction, less hardened to the sinful and the vulgar.  The loss of vulnerability caused me to harbor attitudes and to build strongholds around thoughts that would before have been swept away  by an inflow of the Holy Spirit.  A lot of the time for the last several years, I have been no fun to be around.  I hope that is starting to change. 

I didn't realize I was turning this into a confession, but, since I have, I might as well add one more thing.  I think I started this blog about four years ago, and, over that time, because of those who visit me here, reading and commenting, I have been able open up and to shed some of my cynicism and lower my shields a little.  In the Book of Acts, you will read a lot about a man named Barnabas.  He was a Levite whose given name was Joseph, but he was such an encouragement to the believers that the Apostles called him Barnabas — the son of encouragement.  So consider yourself Barnabas.  Thanks.

Scattergunning

For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. – Romans 14:7,8

Not one of us lives for himself? Surely Paul would change his view if we could parachute him into just about any locale in America. From ordinary citizens to Wall Street to politicians, everyone seems to be out for himself or herself.

Speaking of Wall Street and politicians, remember a month or so ago when it seemed everyone was crying out against the greed of Wall Street? Government needed to crack down on Wall Street greed. Is it now OK for Wall Street to crack down on government greed? This is like setting two coyotes to watch your chicken flock thinking that one will keep the other honest. The coyotes won’t get into conflict until they get to the last chicken.

So what Paul means is not that Blagojevich, Spitzer, Frank, Clinton, Stevens, Obama, the UAW, and Trump are altruists who act without self interest. He means that in reality our lives are not our own. We may not understand that. I may think and act as if I am the center of the universe, but I am not. I was designed and built for something that transcends my individual life.

Now we come to a sticky point. There are many passages that could be pulled from the Bible which would seem to indicate I should live for others. I am to be concerned for my fellow man and willing to sacrifice for the good of those in need. While that is true, it can easily miss the point and do more harm than good. The foundation of all good works needs to be faith. I don’t live or die for another human. I live and die for the Lord because I belong to Him. My good works are a manifestation of that understanding.

As an example take Oprah Winfrey. Please. Here is a woman who wipes her butt with hundred dollar bills. I don’t recommend this -- apparently it makes your ass really big.

Eeow. I have to go to my happy place for a minute.

Ms. Winfrey has the girls’ school in Africa. She gives away cars. She donates to charities and does all kinds of good works for other people. I assume the recipients of her largesse (happy thought, hap-py thought!) sometimes benefit and experience a better life. But it doesn’t seem to help Oprah. Here is a woman who has wealth, fame, power, personal trainers, chefs, body slaves, whatever, and she cannot stop eating. She announced this week that she has now reached the two hundred pound plateau once again. And that’s probably two hundred in dog pounds. I’m not sure plateau is the right word either.

She has no husband, no children, and apparently no life – if we don’t count destroying America by promoting bad diets, pop psychology, spiritual frauds, crappy books, Obama, and emotion-based value systems.

People like Oprah are not necessarily bad people. Their intentions are good. They are trying to help others. They are concerned about what they perceive as righteous causes. The problem is their works have no foundation. They are building upon sand because they are not living first in obedience to God. They do not recognize that they and those they are trying to help belong first and foremost to the Lord. He is our Father. He is the Good Shepherd. Acting without that understanding of the nature and truth of God leads them into many errors.

God is not a genie in a bottle or the fairy freaking godmother. We live for Him. That’s what Paul is telling us. If you read in chapters fourteen and fifteen of Romans, you will see the quoted verse is in the middle of a treatise on tolerance for the purpose of maintaining unity in the Church. Paul warns us against judging our brothers by what they eat or don’t eat and varying opinions about non-essential practices. He asks: “Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls; and stand he will, for the Lord is able to make him stand” (Romans 14:4).

Intolerance is one of the hallmarks of the left and those do-gooders like Oprah and Obama. They want to standardize us. They want us to fit the mold. They want us to be as miserable as they are, or at least for “the little people out there” to be equally miserable. The collectivist seems to think that virtue can be institutionalized and imposed on people from above by the supreme state – their god. And the first problem is who gets to define virtue?

It is not so with us. I was talking yesterday about God doing His work in us and respecting our individuality, and here it is again. We should respect the individuality of the brother who eats and the brother who abstains. The Lord, as far as we can know, is telling the one to eat meat and the other to be a vegetarian. All I can really know is what the Spirit says to me, which is usually something like “why don’t you worry about your own ass instead of Oprah’s”. And I understand that.

Or, as Micah 6:8 puts it: He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness [mercy], and to walk humbly with your God?