Picking tulips

It was my occasion today to engage in conversation with some fellow believers on Facebook, over the subject of limited atonement. My brothers and sisters were incensed at the idea and, like many people brought up in our tradition-bound churches, believed that it was opposed to the message of salvation as being a message of hope for all people.

I have seen a lot of different reactions from people in these sorts of conversations: in a couple instances I had people who just switched to full emotional outburst mode, not wanting to even discuss the topic and calling the idea of Calvinism "satanic." In such cases while I often press them to explain more, typically it's something ingrained deeply and it's beyond my purview to dislodge such thoughts. In other cases it's just because they have certain understandings about what the Bible says, and while we have had respectful conversations it's simply a matter of disagreement. And in some instances people have applied terms such as "four point Calvinist" to themselves, meaning that they believe in some of the less controversial doctrines that descend from the famous TULIP acronym, but limited atonement or unconditional election are sticking points for them, usually for the same reason as the second group but with less reticence over the term "Calvinist."

My desire here is to expound on why I believe in the doctrines of grace, and to explain my contention that, as Charles Spurgeon put it, "Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else." I want to say first and foremost that I'm not here to defend John Calvin as a perfect man, and if your response to this involves wrongs committed by Calvin then quite frankly I'm not interested. John Calvin was just a man, and like myself, a sinner. But he provided a thorough, deep, and accurate understanding of what the Bible teaches about God, about us, and about God's role in bringing about salvation for our sakes.

Advent: Why has He come?

You might not have noticed yet, but it's the Christmas season.  I know, I know..."Really?  I didn't notice.  I mean, aside from the EVERYTHING CHRISTMAS IS EVERYTHING FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I CAN'T TAKE IT" sorry...I think I was channeling a retail employee for a moment there.  My point is, it's Christmas, and that also means that it's time for one essay and discussion after another about "the real meaning of Christmas" or "what Christmas is all about."

Well, let's start simple:


 But more specifically: why did Christ come?  Why did God move to effect salvation of man by sending His Son to Earth to become human, to live the life he did, to die, and to rise again?  To examine all the implications of and answers to that question, would require a book and perhaps someday I'll be given the chance to write that.  But I want to speak to the presuppositions underlying the issue, as well as share some of the more thought-provoking reading I've been blessed to engage in lately, thanks to the new house which gives me my own "study" to do said reading.

One of the remarkable things about Christianity is the nature of God as He reveals Himself in His Word.  I am going to turn over a not-small portion of this post to Francis Schaeffer, because I don't feel I can explain it better without simply plagiarizing him:

The historic Christian answer concerning verifiable facts and knowing turns on who God is, on who is there.  The God who is there according to the Scriptures is the personal-infinite God.  There is no other god like this God.  It is ridiculous to say that all religions teach the same things when they disagree at the fundamental point as to what God is like.  The gods of the East are infinite by definition--the definition being "god is all that is."  This is the pan-everything-ism god.  The gods of the West have tended to be personal but limited; such were the gods of the Greeks, Romans and Germans.  But the God of the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, is the infinite-personal God.

[...]

How then is God's creation related to Himself and to itself?  On the side of God's infinity there is a break between God and the whole of His creation.  I am as separated from God in the area of His being the Creator and infinite and I being the creature and finite, as is the atom or energy particle.  I am no closer to God on this side than the machine.

However on the side of God's personality, the break comes between man and the rest of creation.  In terms of modern thought this is a dynamic conception of which modern man and modern theology know nothing.  So Schweitzer identified himself with the hippopotamus, for he did not understand that man's relationship is upward; and therefore he looked downward to a creature which does many of the same things as himself.  But on the side of personality, if our relationship is upward, then everything concerning man's "mannishness" is in place.

 So what does this have to do with the question above?  What relevance does this have to do with the season of Advent, when we celebrate the coming of God in Jesus Christ?  It's relevant because Jesus came not as an impersonal force, not as a new faceless edict from a prophet...He came as a man.  Jesus came as a man who then built personal, deep relationships with other people.  He preached for certain, but reading the Bible we see that His biggest, most transformative work was done in the lives of the men and women He was closest to: He healed many, but His disciples He worked with beyond physical pains down to their hearts, loving them gently and leading them to become the men who would boldly proclaim His name to the world. 

God is infinite and His infinite nature is something that leads many to say things like "We can't really ever understand God" in the sense that trying is a fool's errand.  But no one has been asked to express the inexpressible: it is God's good purpose to give us Himself personally just as much as to awe us with His infinity.  "The heavens proclaim the glory of God," wrote the psalmist, and gazing into the sky and seeing the vastness of the universe, knowing as we do now how much more vast and great it is than they could have dreamed those thousands of years ago both in a macro and micro sense, we wonder exactly how much greater our God is if this universe is just a speck compared to His majesty.  But we are edified, and humbled, by the man Jesus Christ who came to Earth to live the life we can never live, die the death we deserve to die, and to look broken, rebellious sinners in the face and bring restoration, healing and love to them.  Praise God, those words came to me through His Word and His Spirit, and changed a heart once buried in sin.

And so this advent season, we look back to His first coming, and ahead, to His second.  May that day come soon, to give rest to the weary and to complete the work begun on the cross and at the grave.

Music in church and heart

If you're a Christian (or heck, not a Christian) and on any form of social media, you probably saw this video on your newsfeed within the last couple of weeks:


The Worship of God Q&A: Holy Hip-Hop from NCFIC on Vimeo.

The topic of "holy hip-hop," "reformed rap," or whatever you'd like to call it is not a new one.  It, along with Christian rock music and its descendants like Christian metal, have a history of controversy in the church.  I have experience from my much, much younger days of our church undergoing a split because the older, hymn-preferring people were greatly vexed by a new music minister that dared to bring in more contemporary worship music (very, very tame stuff by today's standards--things like early Michael W. Smith, Michael Omartian, and the like).  The gentlemen above do not seem to have a much better opinion, or understanding, of rap music as it exists today in Christianity.

The reaction to their words has been very broad of scope, and while of course there have been a lot of ill-advised words from random Internet commenters, the thoughtful and thorough responses of many Christian rappers have been very interesting and heartening to see.  My own thoughts are a combination of annoyance, which I am trying to suppress, and a desire to teach.

I have a music degree, and I spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time thinking about, studying, and participating in or performing music.  Music history, while generally a rather vexing subject for any performance major especially when you're talking about history before the Baroque era, is a subject that one should at least be nominally familiar with before drawing judgment on any form of music.  I say this because of one of the points made by Scott Aniol, a point he defends in a continued discussion with rapper Shai Linne on his website: that rap music is, by its very nature, immoral.  I am deeply concerned by his arguably ignorant statements he makes about hip hop in general and Christian hip hop especially.  To be totally honest, I view his position as descriptive of the problem of communication between American evangelicals and much of the rest of society: so many evangelicals are so concerned about "cleaning up" things and putting them within a certain little Christian box.

But when that's your desire, when you're more worried about things like the style of music your kid is listening to than the actual content of it, you're missing out on actually engaging your kid where he is.  Likewise, we have a huge section of this country that exists in hip hop culture.  I can speak from experience in saying that it's very easy for cultural conservatives to look at that culture, roll their eyes at its style and speech and say things like "Rap is just 'crap' without the C."  But I'm not interested in trying to conserve a particular culture: I'm interested in seeing more and more people come to know, love and worship Jesus Christ as Lord.  How is it possibly helpful for me to come up to someone who has existed in this world and say "Well, it's great that you want to know Jesus, but you're going to need to wear these clothes, throw out all this music and start listening to some Bill Gaither."*

Answer: it isn't.  When you put up all these extra, culture-oriented barriers between a person and knowing Christ, the concern arises that you don't particularly understand the Gospel, and might even need to review the book of Galatians.  But let's step back from that for a moment and return to the issue of music history and its relevance to this issue.  In particular, in response to this statement from Aniol:

Third, you are making a very common category error in these discussions. I agree completely, of course, that whatever God creates is good. God created music. God created meat. These things are good.
But God did not create rap. People did. For that matter, God did not create Gregorian chant, German chorales, Appalachian folk tunes, country western, jazz, or rock ‘n’ roll. People did. And because these are all human communication, they are moral.
It is very dangerous to ascribe to God something that he did not make.

 This is a difficult area because it's understandable that sinful things have arisen from the minds and desires of man, twisted as they are by our innate brokenness.  And I certainly understand his wariness and resistance towards music that are not part of the traditional realm of church.  But I disagree vehemently that God did not create those forms of music.  God did not simply create the realm of sound and the rules and laws of physics that cause sound to come across to our ears in such a way that our brains recognize it as music.  God created sound in such a way, on purpose, that it would sound like thus and so when certain sounds come together, and perhaps more importantly He endowed us with the creativity to do with music what we do, and all of it in one way or another will eventually glorify God.

To be sure, rap has a very twisted and broken history.  But so does all music, and for the simple reason that it all comes from broken, sinful humans.  The church was the forefront of music development for a long time simply because for a period of time, they were funding a lot of its best and brightest.  One example: the oratorio style was developed in response to the church rejecting opera as an acceptable style for performance in churches.  But people who knew and understood the medium and wanted it to be used to glorify Christ got hold if it, removed the costumes and staging and cleaned up the subject matter, and bam: new style, church-approved.  Or for that matter, take a look at old-style gospel music like the aforementioned Bill Gaither*: look at its roots in blues and folk music, and you will find a lot of music that is not acceptable in church for its subject matter But people who loved Jesus and grew up with a history and culture in those forms of music began to use it for His name and created a new genre, one that rightfully for many people is regarded fondly and is stirring to their souls.

I'm not trying to write a hyper-accurate or detailed history here.  I simply want to make the point that I do not accept the presupposition that there is a thing that cannot be redeemed for the sake of Christ, because all things that are true belongs to Him.  Let me just head off the obvious argument right here: "Are you saying there can be Christian porn?"  Of course not.  That's because sex, like everything else, was created by God for a purpose, and porn is a twisting and abuse of that purpose into sinfulness. 

This is a tough subject to tackle because I want to give it the proper gravity it deserves, but I also don't want to go on and on since I don't think I'm that terribly interesting.  I will, however, pass you off to some gentlemen much more suited to speaking to this issue than myself, and I would encourage you to listen to the whole hour:


*There is nothing wrong with Bill Gaither, or liking Bill Gaither.  Please do not write me or comment saying "Stop making fun of Bill Gaither!" because I'm not.  Crikey.

Celebrity vs. accountability: the disconcerting case of Mark Driscoll

UPDATE to below: Wade Burleson makes the point I feel like I am trying to make here, though more eloquently and with some more details.  But you don't have to take my word for it.

I am someone who could be considered part of the generation of "de-churched, re-churched" believers--young men and women who grew up in church, fell out either wholly or in part as we became entranced by the real world, but then experienced God's call to truth and found ourselves transformed and back in church not simply because "that's what Mom and Dad did" but because we found ourselves in love with Jesus.  There is a list of preachers who find themselves at the forefront of this revival of sorts, three in particular that often come to mind and mention: John Piper, whose terminology inspires this blog title; Matt Chandler, my own pastor; and Mark Driscoll, whose Mars Hill Church began as an effort to preach the Gospel to Seattle, one of the most notoriously unchurched cities in America, and has grown to have campuses all over the western United States.  All three pastors are prolific speakers, and both Piper and Driscoll are prolific writers.*

But John Piper and Matt Chandler are missing one commonality with Mark Driscoll: they have not become the subject of notoriety or accusations regarding their behavior or personal character.

Book review: What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qu'ran

Let me preface this by saying that I don't consider myself to have any sort of authority to really "review" this or any other book as...well, as an authority.  I am writing about it purely from the perspective of, I would say, the sort of person this book is intended for: a Christian desiring to have knowledge that can aid in the preaching of the Gospel to those who need to hear it most (that would be everyone).  And to that end, the book I want to discuss is exceedingly useful.

The book I refer to is What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qu'ran, by James White of Alpha & Omega Ministries.  Dr. White is an incredibly intelligent and well-spoken teacher and preacher of the Word, and while there are a couple of minor points we may disagree over*, by and large I have found his work to be invaluable in expanding my understanding, maturity and confidence.  He has a prolific body of work, and is known for his unflinching engagement of apologetic issues ranging from second and third tier issue discussions (issues like spiritual giftings and the various "isms" of Christianity, like new perspectivism, Calvinism vs. Arminianism, etc.), cultic offshoots of Christianity (such as King James Onlyists) and other religions such as Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses, atheism, and of course, Islam.

There are many things to appreciate about all of Dr. White's works, but three primary ones shine through that make this work helpful and edifying for the believer:

1. It is detailed and utilizes good scholarship while still being readable and clear.  So much writing is just hard to wade through because it's so thick, either with dry, boring prose or the author's own overwrought attempts to sound "casual" that generally result in them sounding confused and unclear.  Dr. White is a heavy user of footnotes, and every statement is backed up with thorough documentation so that, should the reader so desire, one can verify if his statements are true and reflective of what he is discussing.  In addition to this, he is completely transparent both as to his motivations and his sources, and such transparency only serves to make his work more credible in the eyes of someone who may otherwise be skeptical of a Christian writing about Islam.
2. This is not an anti-Muslim screed, or a book about the encroaching dangers of Islamofascism/sharia law in the West.  Dr. White desires to see transformed hearts in the Muslim world, and approaches them not as enemies needing to be beaten back, but as brothers and sisters that are astray and in need of Christ's love.  As a result, this book is written in love and in a spirit of gentle correction and discussion that, one hopes, would be accompanied by the Spirit's movement in the hearts of readers to unlock chains of deception.  That in and of itself makes it incredibly unique.
3. Dr. White is devoted to the idea that a text should be able to speak for itself, and therefore the book has extensive quotations from both the Qu'ran and the hadith literature that forms the body of understanding and commentary on the Qu'ran.  By doing so he is able to open the minds of Christians seeking to understand their Muslim neighbors, to talk about their worldview without attacking and to give an apologetic basis for engaging in the areas that typically are sticking points between Christians and Muslims.  In one section, he writes about the claims of the Qu'ran that "people of the book" (a.k.a., Jews and Christians) should look to their own writings (the Torah and the Gospel) for evidence that Mohammed is Allah's final prophet and that the Qu'ran is Allah's true and final word, while also demonstrating that the Qu'ran's author clearly did not know what was contained in either of those writings.**  While anyone who has engaged with someone from another faith can well attest, simply demonstrating this will not generally cause them to make an about-face into Christianity.  It can, however, open doors of dialogue, and demonstrate that we as believers do take them seriously and desire to understand them. 

The spirit of love and the earnest desire to see Muslim lives transformed by the power of the Gospel is infectious and clear.  This is a book that anyone who wishes to understand their neighbors, their mission field or just to understand the true thoughts and desires of the people we see portrayed on the news as everything from savage monsters to innocent victims of Western colonialism.  Muslims, like all others, need to know that Jesus is not simply a teacher or prophet, not simply someone who said good things and carries a title of Messiah, but that Jesus lives and that He gave His life to redeem theirs.  They need to know that their good works do not hold value before a holy and just God, but that in Christ they are seen as justified, sanctified and glorified, adopted children of the living God.

I encourage everyone to read this book.  I read it on my Kindle phone app, which was very useful in hopping back and forth easily between the main part of the book and the footnotes.  While it won't make you an expert on Islam (a title even Dr. White does not claim), it together with a knowledge of the Bible will give you a foothold in understanding it and its adherents, and in being able to have loving, fruitful conversations that, God willing, will lead to lives transformed by the power of the Gospel.

Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.--1 Peter 3:14-16

The light of love and the one who least deserved it

I was listening to a streaming discussion about Calvinism, and commentary related to a tape being played of someone criticizing it by saying that they heard a lot of theological discussion and verses about the sovereignty of God, but they didn't hear a lot of talk about God's love. My wife was listening with me and she mentioned that she agreed with him to some extent: that she feels like a lot of theological talk comes apart from a discussion about God's love, and so people who are hurting and tired that come to this just have no interest in hearing it, and in fact it serves to place a heavier burden on them. And this placed a weight on my own heart. After all, I certainly have not felt like that about the teaching and preaching that has greatly impacted my own life. The words of men like Matt Chandler, John Piper and Charles Spurgeon have always come to me, not as an intellectual, dry talk about theological issues, but as hot, passionate love notes to a God that authored their very existences, who transformed them from people who were focused on themselves, their own comfort and desires, into men who were willing to sacrifice all that for the sake of giving glory to Jesus and pointing others to Him. And I realized that I needed to do a better job of being that same person, of not simply being a knower and explainer, but of being a lover and an example of how much Jesus has shown me His immense love for me.

My life before His life was poured out into me was one that had begun in church, but in which I feel like my ears were not open to hear. I know truth was spoken, and my parents especially sought to gently, lovingly bring us up in a Godly way and point us to Jesus. But even as I managed to conform my external life to a pattern of religion, to a way of talking and acting that seemed good and right, my unseen life was one full of addiction to selfishness. Self-righteousness ruled my life and thoughts, desires to pursue my own way and my own pleasures drove me; as I grew older I found a growing addiction to and desire for pornography that would not be satisfied. I was self-centered, and even moralistic statements I might have made were not because I understood the real significance of who God is and what it meant for His Son to have come to die for my sins, but because I believed deep down that the way to please God was to be able to hold on to an intellectual position. My eyes were closed to the reality that the life I lived, and the thoughts I allowed into my head, were a complete insult to the God I paid lip service to.

But God is rich in mercy, and it was His mercy that began to take away the things that I had used to tell myself that I was good enough on my own, in my own head. My success in school, in music, in life in general eroded, and I was left feeling frustrated and tired. I was getting along just enough, and I was sick of it but I knew no other way except to just continue as I had. Then one day almost exactly six years ago, God opened my ears, and I heard for the first real time the Gospel of Christ preached--not that I had not heard it before, but that it was in that moment that the Spirit spoke directly to me, in words of conviction, of love, of a desire to lead me into the true joy of really knowing Jesus.

And things happened in a series, quickly at first to let that first seed fall, and then afterwards slowly as the new life planted within me began to grow and flower. First, God gave me a mirror in the form of His Word: my ability to hang on to a belief that I did not really live out didn't make me commendable. It made me a functional atheist. It was really irrelevant what I thought about God, if my heart hated Him and wanted to pursue wickedness and selfishness. He showed me how I had acted in an evil manner in the way I acted in secret, and in the way I acted publically: not simply my porn addiction but the way I dealt with my friends, with strangers, with people online and in real life. No longer was I able to look at another and think "I am superior," because God broke that down: I was the chief of sinners, undeserving of anything except death.

But that was only the beginning, and the next part is why the preceding section is seen as mercy: He showed me how much He loved me. I was able to see the examples in the Word of mighty men and women of God...who really, weren't so mighty. They were broken people, just like me, who struggled with their sin and ached for a closer relationship with their God, who made mistakes and were reconciled. And God forgave, God loved, God transformed, not because they had done anything to make themselves better, but because it was His good pleasure to do exactly that. God's love extended so far that He sent His Son, who deserves nothing but ultimate praise and worship as the Creator and the Word of God, to become a man born to the lowliest station of life, to live the life I could never live and die the death I deserved to die, because He desired to adopt into His kingdom sons and daughters who knew that love and desired Him above all things.

And in having my eyes opened to that love...I broke. I wept openly and praised the Name of the Living God that He would ever make my life anything other than a display of His justice...instead, He made it a display of His mercy. He made it a moment to show His incredible forgiveness, His love and goodness in working out His desires to adopt and redeem me. Again, not because I had deserved it, not because I memorized enough verses, or knew the right things, or acted the right way. Certainly not because I could hold and defend an intellectual position, but because it was His pleasure and desire to glorify Himself by loving me more than I could ever deserve. And that is why I love God, it's why I love the doctrine of God's sovereignty and His rule over my life...because I do not deserve it, but He has worked it anyway. I pray for more and deeper roots, and I pray that I would be seen as a gentle, nail-pierced example of that love, to my wife most of all.

Strange Fire follow-up

Just as an aside from my last post, I wanted to share this link to John Piper's response to the Strange Fire conference. Not because I consider him the ultimate authority or anything, but because I feel like he has done a much better job than I did in explaining the hestitancy I have in putting myself in one camp or the other for this particular debate. I would recommend listening to all the podcasts listed.

Strange fire

Last week, the hubbub on Twitter and around the Christian blogosphere was John MacArthur's Strange Fire conference, which was dedicated to discussing the issue of, for lack of a better term, the charismatic movement and what MacArthur believes is an avalanche of false teaching that, to some extent, has begun to reach the mainstream of evangelical Christian teaching.  I am stuck in a position where, while I share many of his concerns about "charismania" and will absolutely call things like the prosperity gospel, the Word of Faith movement and phenomena like the "Toronto Blessing" and the "Brownsville Revival" unbiblical, I am not a cessationist like he is.  The best understanding of my position is probably the phrase "charismatic Calvinist"--I absolutely believe that the gifts of the Spirit continue to this day and I have not seen a convincing case made from Scripture that they have ceased, but I also believe strongly that they exist for precisely the same purposes they did in Scripture: to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ and bring others to repentance and salvation.

I grew up in a church that was extremely wary of anything even remotely charismatic (although on reflection, it was equally wary of anything remotely Calvinist), and after the Lord saw fit to pull me back in to Himself in 2007 I found myself in a place that was much more...exuberant than anything I was used to.  When I was a kid, the idea that someone would raise their hands in worship would have drawn stares and probably a talking-to from a deacon after service.  By contrast, at the Village people worshiped in such a way as they felt stirred their hearts for Christ. 

The humanist half-gospel

The new Catholic Pope Francis has been making a lot of waves in the news lately.  Certainly he's an interesting character to watch from the perspective of someone who rejects his authority to speak as he claims he can, with God's own words.  But he's said a lot of things that have people talking about how the church talks about its role in the world and about ministry--well, the Catholic church at least, but it bears discussing.  There's a couple of articles in particular I read that deserve responding to, especially in talking about issues of Christian doctrine, truth, and why Christians ought to both be actively doing good to those around them while unapologetically preaching the truth of the Gospel to a culture that rejects it angrily.

From the Daily Beast article:

Pope Francis used [the story of St. Francis renouncing his wealth] to assert that, like that first Francis, Christians have on too many clothes. We must “lay ourselves bare,” he said, and “divest ourselves from this worldliness: the spirit contrary to the spirit of the beatitudes, the spirit contrary to the spirit of Jesus.” He repeated this command to “strip ourselves” of worldliness several times and concluded with a flourish: “Spiritual worldliness kills! It kills the soul! It kills the Church!”

What a phrase: spiritual worldliness. How can something be at the same time worldly, and spiritual?  The answer is, it can’t, and Francis knows this well. He is slyly saying that our spirituality is often a farce, that the church has for years draped itself in clothes that masquerade as holy but are actually just earthly rags.

It’s not a stretch to think that Francis is pointing his finger across the ocean at so much of what has characterized American Christianity over the past 30 years.  The empty layers of denomination and doctrine that have little to do with grace. The gospels of health and wealth that stand in contradiction to the gospel of Christ. The political rhetoric and advocacy that claim the mantel of the eternal for decidedly temporal causes.

I don't know much about Joshua DuBois other than what it says in the "about the author" section at the end of the article, that he was an adviser to President Obama for religious affairs and that he has an African Methodist Episcopal background.  But he's saying a lot of good things here, right?  Both of them, actually, the Pope and DuBois.  So many people, especially in the West, exist in one of two states as regards spirituality: either they reject God entirely and opt for secularism, or they exist in some kind of spiritual state that looks to be about God but really is about getting what they want for themselves.  I've discussed this division in the past as it refers to this passage:

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.--1 Corinthians 1:20-25

But there's an issue here: the Pope calls us to give up "spiritual worldiness," though he doesn't really define that.  DuBois takes the step of trying to define it, and he points out some other issues within the church that detract from the Gospel, but he is left talking about the need for the church to...give up...something?  He ends the article with, "But if Christians can muster the courage to strip off false religion and stand clothed in grace alone, we might yet save the American church. Here’s hoping for a bit of Francis’s naked faith."  But the church, in America or elsewhere, was not established on humans building anything and it's not going to be "saved" by anything but God continuing to maintain His elect as He has throughout history.  But that rather major issue aside, they are scratching the surface of something true.  If they won't dig in all the way, though, what good is it?

The other article is by Lincoln Chafee, current governor of Rhode Island.  As expected, it's written in lots of pol-speak, but it touches the same concern on different issues of the day:

The first Jesuit to ascend to the papacy, Pope Francis recently told La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal, that too many people have become obsessed with gays, abortion and contraception. His vision of a more inclusive faith that does not discriminate against anyone is a conviction in which I believe the vast majority of Rhode Islanders and Americans share.

Pope Francis, by his actions and words, demonstrates that he is determined to eliminate the scourge of prejudice in our society and to renew our civic purpose as a people.

For too long, religious extremism has prevailed at the expense of our common human ties. In certain circles in America and countries around the world, there are those people who try to demean others as lesser based on their social standing, skin color or the person they love.

I question how, exactly, Chafee defines "eliminating religious extremism."   He talks about how the Pope has pushed the Catholic church to refocus on issues of service to the poor and social justice.  Again, nothing bad here, nothing to be against.  But does Chafee truly believe that to preach the Gospel is to stand against these things?  Does he believe that Jesus, in calling everyone to repent of their sinfulness and idolatry and follow Him, is promoting "religious extremism?"  He certainly wasn't very popular for such a message, even though it contained elements of both DuBois' and Chafee's statements.

Jesus did not come to bring a message of social justice; he did not come to simply call for an end to "spiritual worldiness" or to tell us to "stop being so obsessed with sin."  He brought the Gospel, the good news that starts off very badly.  Everyone everywhere that believes they are good enough, that they've done the right things or had the correct thoughts, is fooling themselves.  We begin our life in sin, and on our own even our best laid plans are only paths deeper into sinfulness.  But Jesus came with the message that with repentance from sins and faith in His sacrifice on the cross, His resurrection, and His status now as our eternal high priest who has made the atonement for everything, we have renewed life that continues beyond this earthly one.

Should we be giving up our attachment to worldly things?  Yes, but if we are not then turning to Christ from those things, what is there to gain from it?  Do we need to show love to those who struggle with sin of all kinds, no matter what it is.  Absolutely yes, and it's also true that many Christians do not do a good job of showing mercy to those who struggle with sins different from their own.  But at the same time, we do not commit an act of love in any sense of completeness if it does not involve sharing that same message of repentance and grace in the cross.  Grace is not simply "come on in, the water's fine," it is "come over here, there is room here at the foot of the cross for you as well."

DuBois and Chafee together with the Pope they are discussing cover the parts of the gospel people want to hear--the part that lets them do enough to be good and to look down on those who don't do as they are doing.  But all three of them are leaving out the parts that are truly life-giving and -transforming, because they involve turning aside from worshiping our own desires.  Being able to acknowledge aspects of truth is good...but it's also dangerous, because it means there is no excuse for not acknowledging all of it.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.--Romans 1:18-25

Pain and joy pt. 5: Two roads

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”--Matthew 22:34-40

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.--Galatians 5:16-23

 Last time I ended with an example drawn upon the account of Jesus' crucifixion in Luke 23.  On either side of Jesus hung criminals; guilty of what is not known, but the incredible difference in their reaction to Jesus dying between them hangs as an incredible illustration of the two incredibly different ways that we react to pain and suffering in our lives.  Two men, both about to die, both right there with the one Man in all the universe that might do anything to help them.  One of the criminals yells at Jesus and demands that He do what He can to save his life, to let him down from the cross.  He does not want salvation in the sense that Christ offers it to anyone; he wants to use Jesus to get what he wants right now--in this case, avoidance of death and the end of this particular moment of pain.  He clings to his life, and so, he loses it and with it, hope.

The other criminal does the opposite: he admits his guilt and asks only that Jesus remember him when He comes into what will be His.  He humbles himself and lays his fate, as quickly as it is coming upon him, at the feet of a man who is dying just as painfully right next to him.  And Jesus' reaction is truly a moment of bittersweet triumph: this man, guilty of only God knows what at this point in history, would be with Jesus in heaven because he refused to cling to his life and his desires, but gave them up knowing that they were worthless.

I want to look at the incredible contrast in the second passage above, Galatians 5:16-23.  We see the fruit of the desires of our flesh laid against the fruit of the Spirit.  In other words, the result of pursuing what we naturally want in our state of being separated from God, versus the result of the Spirit's work in us to recreate us in the image of Jesus.  Left to our own devices, we run after things that bring us no life, no lasting joy, nothing resembling real happiness if viewed in the long term and in real life without blinders.  These are what the Bible calls idols, and they can take virtually any form, especially in modern society where literal idol worship is supplanted with the self.

Pain and joy pt. 4: The difficult doctrine of the love of God

Let me say first and foremost that the title is borrowed from the title of an excellent book by D.A. Carson, which I highly recommend.  It's not a long read, but it absolutely is worth every moment spent digging in.  I borrow it because I believe it plays into what I am going to talk about in this post, which is one of the most challenging, frustrating and, quite frankly, offensive truths about pain and suffering that we need to address: that pain is a sign that of God's love for us.

Why offensive?  Because we as humans begin our lives with a very backwards and twisted (from God's perspective) view of who we are in relation to the world, and who God is in relation to us.  Humanity has a very upside-down view of the relationship between God and man--at least, I would argue, any outsider looking in would certainly think so  Imagine, for example, going to a store and seeing a parent and child.  The child wants to grab everything, eat whatever he can get his hands on, you know, typical kid stuff, and wails his head off when the parent yanks bottles of poison from his mitts.  All the kid knows is, he wants what he wants and he can't think of any good reason why he shouldn't have that. 

You, the stranger watching this wrestling match between a kid who would just as soon kill himself as obey his parent, and a parent who only wants the best for the child and is bound and determined that he is going to learn this one way or another, see the reality of the situation for what it is.  The parent is not trying to harm the child; on the contrary, he wants to prevent harm, by keeping danger away and by teaching the child what is and is not acceptable.  But the kid sees bright colors, sees things that he can grab, put in his mouth, things that he thinks are good--and he can't stand the idea that this person dares to intrude on his personal kingdom with that most hated of words: "No." 

We have no trouble recognizing that this kid desperately needs that parental intervention.  But now we look at our own lives: we go after all manner of things that are poisonous to us physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and as I discussed before God takes all manner of tactics to remove our hands from them and point us towards what is truly good for us.  And we act towards God exactly the way that unruly child acts towards his parent: ungrateful, furious, full of hate for any limitation on our desires and more than willing to justify to ourselves anything we might possibly want.

Come, let us return to the LORD, for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.  After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.  Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.--Hosea 6:1-3

It's one of the most common questions when trying to speak to someone about the Gospel, about the love of God in this cruel, broken world: "What kind of loving God would allow x into the world?" with the variable representing anything from historical mass wickedness of mankind like the Holocaust or the slaughter of American Indians, to personal wrongs felt like the death of family or the loss of a job.  And the reality of it is, this is a hard question to answer because it's hard to look someone in the eye and say "Human experience, even your own, does not outweigh God's Word or His will."  That certainly doesn't feel loving or compassionate, and in reality that's not the way to deal with someone with such a hangup.

But love is the issue, and here is where God's conception of love--which is to say, seeking to lead us to our best and most ultimate purpose, which is to know and love Him above all other things and to understand that He is our source of life--and our conception of it--being given what we desire, being set free from strife and struggle--begin to differ.

In preparing this sermon I have been reading quite a bit, and one book I knew I had to reread was C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain.  I've spoken before about my love for his work, and how he helped to shape my earliest images of the real relationship between myself and Jesus by his depictions of Aslan.  Indeed, if you read The Chronicles of Narnia I believe you will see illustrations of exactly the sort of paradox of pain and love I'm talking about here.  I don't agree with everything he says; for example, his belief in God-directed evolution, and we definitely have different views on the sovereignty of God.  But I think his illustration of the right relationship between God and man, and how sin severed it, deserves quoting:

Up to that moment [when man first sinned] the human spirit had been in full control of the human organism.  It doubtless expected that it would retain this control when it had ceased to obey God.  But its authority over the organism was a delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God's delegate.  Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being, it had cut itself off from the source of power.  For when we say of created things that A rules B this must mean that God rules B through A.  I doubt whether it would have been intrinsically possible for God to continue to rule the organism through the human spirit when the human spirit was in revolt against him.--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

So if we are seperated from God, by our own rebellious acts and desires, that separation compounding the rebellion upon itself, what is God's answer?  He must find a way to teach us truth, and make a way into hardened and sinful hearts to let that truth be heard, take root, and grow into full flower.  So God disciplines directly, while at the same time displaying for us what would seem to us to be a series of strange inversions to our understanding of how the world works.  We believe that might conquers weakness, so the Son of God comes as a servant who exercises His immense power only in very personal, very quiet ways that serve to give glory to the Father, while at the same time God declares Himself a "jealous God" of that which He has created.  Jealous for that which is His, and for the glory which belongs only to Him and which he will not see delivered to another, He does not simply wipe us out and start over, but instead makes a way for us to understand our true source of life and power and strength.

So, He allows pain and suffering into His creation to teach that this broken, sin-spoiled world is not the end and ultimate of things...and then He walks right along with us in it, indeed, walking to it purposefully.  And just like His own endurance of pain, He brings it upon those He loves not out of cursing or anger but out of loving, parental discipline:

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.  In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.  And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?  "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him.  For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives."--Hebrews 12:3-6

 If someone loves anything, let alone the Creator God of the universe, he will endure anything that may come because he knows all of it is in His hands and will lead him to his Father.  He struggles against encroaching bitterness because he will not tolerate anything that blinds his eyes to the truth of God's love, nor will he gaze upon himself except that in doing so he sees the markers of God's love, His strength poured out on him, His fellowship and support in all matters.  And when the day comes that he finally sees Jesus face to face, he finds that he has become like Him in thinking, in heart and in deed, truly a healthy part of the body of Christ.

Of course, that paragraph describes a life that is, in all likelihood, a path through suffering and hardship, loss, and frustration.  Where Psalm 22's prophetic words echoed by Jesus on the cross pass through their mouths not in anger but in a desire to crawl into God's arms and be held: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  And the more he matures, the more he knows even as he speaks those words, God has not forsaken him even in the darkest moments, and he becomes like Paul, a man who sings hymns in prison and does not fear anything man may wish to do to him.

But let's also remember, that person started like everyone else, as a person who carried the worldview of "it's all about what I want."  Pain entered his life and in a dark and frustrating moment, the Gospel entered as well, and he followed after it, guided by the Holy Spirit.  What if that person, in his pain, pushes back and fights?  He lives in Romans 1, quoted in an earlier post, and even as God lets him have what he wants that he might taste it and see how utterly inadequate it is, he pushes back and fights against the same pain and breaking of his heart that the humbled believer submits to, and eventually is hardened.  Not beyond all hope as long as he is alive, but certainly the longer he or anyone walks in this, the harder it is to come back.  I'll address this issue more in the next post, when I start to talk about the ways in which we deal with pain.

All of this together gives pain a larger purpose in our lives of either softening and transforming our hearts, "changing us one degree to the next" into the image of God we were created to be...or, of hardening our hearts and driving us farther and farther from the purposes and relationship God intends us to have with Him.  We see both in the Bible, especially in stories about rulers and their dealings with God.  Pharoah's refusal to obey God results in him seeing his country led through one painful struggle and plague after another, until finally his own firstborn son died along with so many others.  But one thing to note is that Exodus says "God hardened Pharoah's heart."  Part of God's judgment on him was in letting him walk deeper into his own rebellion, to see its total folly. 

David was "a man after God's own heart," but he screwed up a lot.  Indeed, his life gives me hope because if someone like him can be beloved of God, I know that God certainly is basing His love for me on behavior.  His faith was great and in so many of his psalms we see the earliest pictures of redeeming grace and salvation through faith in that grace.  When he sinned and conceived a son with Bathsheba in adultery, then arranged for the death of her husband in battle to cover up his sin, God punished him by allowing the child to die.  David mourned greatly, but just as much it broke his heart all the more to love God and worship Him rightly, and to remember his role as king was one of a servant of his people, not as one who lived off their backs.

And once again, I must point to the beginning of Hebrews 12, that "For the joy set before him, Christ endured the cross," that even as he sweated blood and cried out to His Father in the Garden of Gethsemene, He was obedient to God's will knowing that in spite of the horrendous day that would follow, the greatest glory would render that day nothing more than a pinprick.  And when he did walk through that day, he did not curse that pain or react in anger or desperation towards any.  He did not begrudingly walk through it but sought even in that to display the love of God:

And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.  And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  And they cast lots to divide his garments.  And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!"--Luke 23-33-35

 He didn't stumble into a bad situation and suffer unintended consequences.  Over and over Jesus prophesied exactly what was going to happen, and He didn't flee from it, nor did He embrace it like some kind of zealot.  Instead, He entered into obedience knowing that by doing so, He walked into and would lead many to far greater joy.  As long as we live there is never a moment too late for us to come to know that love and transforming power of Christ:

One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, "Are you not the Christ?  Save yourself and us!"  But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?  And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong."  And he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."  And he said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."--Luke 23:39-43

 And that picture is one of humanity: two people, suffering exactly the same way, one of whom wants Jesus only as an escape from pain back to what he had before, the other submitting himself to it knowing it is deserved and asking for, and receiving, forgiveness.  In how He lived and how He died, Jesus displays Himself as savior, king and Lord of all, and in recognizing that even in his last few moments of life that man found real life even as death came upon him.

The different ways these two men saw Jesus is the division between being hardened or softened by our walks of life, and it is this division of reaction that I want to address next time: not the big picture, but what happens moment by moment as we engage pain and strife.  How do we react, and what does that in turn create in us?  We will look at that next.

Pain and joy pt. 3: The illusion of control

I want to keep going on this idea of brokenness from the last post, because it's crucial to understanding what God accomplishes by allowing pain to exist in this world.  First, a bit of Scripture.  Well, a lot of Scripture:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.--Romans 1:18-32

Look at the pattern that we see here: Knowledge of God and who He is, written into our beings and engraved on creation, is rejected by people who instead desire to do what they want and give honor and glory not to the Creator but to other aspects of creation--nature, gods made with hands, other people, even themselves--and so, God's judgment is to say "If you think that's what you want, then have it, as much as you can stand, and see how it fulfills you." 

Even as He allows people to walk into what they think they want, what they think is good for them, He introduces into it all moments that reveal the utter folly of their thinking to them, reminders that there is impending judgment.  The way we react to that over the course of life is what makes us either men and women transformed by the healing and restoring power of Christ into images of the living God...or people condemned to eternity away from God because we refuse to relinquish our grip on our lives, deeds and thoughts.  Paul wrote to the Corinthians that "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price."  Through the mists of pain and suffering in this world, God works to break us of the belief that we can bring our own lives into a state of perfection and happiness.

And what belief drives our society more, after all?  Walk into any bookstore and you'll see sizable sections devoted to self-help and self-improvement.  Even churches get in on the act, with many people going on Sunday not to hear the Gospel that brings life, but to hear sermon after sermon about how to get what they want out of life--not what God wants them to pursue in life, namely a relationship with Him full of true and unshakable joy, but how to find some semblance of happiness and achievement draped in churchy words.

The book of Job is ripe with the struggle between human self-righteousness and God's holiness.  God allows Satan to take everything from Job: his wealth, his children, his health, leaving him miserable and desperate.  But God's reasons for allowing Satan such latitude, as always, were to glorify Himself by taking the good and righteous Job and teaching him that his goodness was nothing compared to God.

When Job's friends come, they each try to convince him that he must have committed some horrible sin that God is punishing him for.  Job's response to these fools is partially right: he contends that he has not done anything wrong to deserve such punishment, but they persist in believing what many people, even Christians, today believe is the marker of God's behavior: that He punishes bad and rewards good, very simply and cleanly.  Such belief, unrooted as it is in either Scripture or even a modest observation of the way the world works, is a quickstep away from apostasy and atheism, and precisely the reason that the apostles chose to endure sufferings in full view of the church: that they might know that there is a joy that transcends circumstance.  But I digress.

Job is partially wrong in his responses to his friends, because while he is correct in that he is not being punished for a wrong, he is wrong in saying that his own righteous deeds uphold him in God's eyes.  And in that, we get to the reason why God allowed Satan to run roughshod over poor Job.  God wants Job to understand that righteousness is of faith in Him and His redeeming power, not in any act of self.  And after chapter after chapter of Job's alleged friends giving horrible advice and Job being frustrated in the face of it, God finally comes down and shuts everyone up, Job most of all:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Dress for action like a man;
    I will question you, and you make it known to me.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
    Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
    Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
    or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?--Job 38:1-7

And on and on, God points out the foolishness of Job ever hoping to hold his own righteous acts up to the standards of the Creator God of the universe.  The end of the book is remarkable, because even with all of this God never stops loving Job or viewing him as a beloved servant.  Job's acts do not control his life, but God's sovereignty and love lead him through pain, loss and suffering into a new understanding of his relationship with God and a restoration of what he lost.

But what about what is probably the most striking image of suffering in the Bible--what about Jesus?  Jesus is a paradox in this sense: He absolutely does have control here.  The weather, the waves, the natural and the supernatural are both utterly beholden to His commands.  And He is sinless, He is humble and serves others who see Him as their king and rightful ruler, and He knows the finest details of the Scriptures as only their original Source could possibly know them.  Yet...He chooses to endure some of the worst suffering imaginable.  Why?

For the sake of joy.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.--Hebrews 12:1-2

For the joy that was set before him, Christ went through one of the most horrific days conceived by men, and men did conceive of it--only because He allowed them to.  Jesus did it so that we might understand, this world is not all there is, and our lives that end are not our ultimate purpose.  We spend so many of our days chasing after comfort, pleasure, and when we encounter questions of meaning we either try to sink them into pursuits and religions that cannot fulfill because they were authored by men that, likewise, had no fulfilling of their own, or we drown them in idolatries and pride...but we'll come back to that next time.  But Jesus laid aside every comfort He could have seized as one who was fully man just as He was fully God, for the sake of displaying that the real goal of our lives is to lay them down for the sake of glorifying God to others.

Paul tasted the goodness and joy that accompanied such sufferings, and told of it to Timothy:

For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.--2 Timothy 4:6-8

No shame at what he hadn't experienced or done, no fear of death, only the knowledge that by going for the true, lasting joy of the Father, Paul had embraced the only thing that would ever last.  Esau traded his birthright for a bowl of stew.  Paul, however, embraced his, and suffered far worse than hunger pangs, so that he might have a seat at the eternal banquet.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that Paul did something that made him okay.  But what he did do, was live a life by faith, walking through everything that God led him through until eventually that path led to the executioner.  We don't know where our lives may lead, but we do know that the godly way to endure, to deal with every issue that we encounter in life, is not to "curse God and die" as Job's wife advised him, but to remember that every day we're here is a blessing, is a moment to know that God is providing for us exactly what we need to live and to be transformed into a glorious image of our loving Father.  It's why Paul can say "To live is Christ, and to die is gain" and then go out and live exactly that.  God help me, I hope that I can embrace that truth as much in even the smallest annoyances all the way to the worst sufferings of life.

As we get ready to land this plane, so to speak, and move from this 30,000 foot view of pain into a more personal level, there is one more aspect that I need to discuss next time: that pain is proof of God's love for us.  I've touched it here, and I want to dig deeper.

Pain and joy part 2: The role of pain in a broken world

Christians have a strange relationship with issues of pain.  No one enjoys it, of course, but there are some who believe that all painful and difficult things are a sign the devil is trying to attack us and trip us up, while others view it as testing from God.  And honestly, from a biblical standpoint...it's hard to say either are completely wrong.  But what I want to talk about is expanding our view of this, so that we can see the bigger picture God is working on in us through our life experiences.

Let's start at the beginning, to the time before the world saw the introduction of sin and death: God created the world, He created it in perfection, and He created Adam and set him about the task of naming and ordering the entire world. In other words, man was given to the role of being dedicated to hard work long before the fall; it was God's intention for this to be the way we are.  Likewise: when God created Eve, Adam immediately knew that unlike all the animals he had spent God only knows how much time seeing and naming, this one was for him, to the point where he had the reaction that continues to be men's natural reaction to seeing something beautiful: he sang a song about her.  And in bringing them together, God blessed them and told them "Be fruitful and multiply."  So God gives Eve a very unique gift: she and Adam are one, and she can bear children.

Don't misread me here: this isn't some kind of "And that's why women should stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" line, because that's not what I'm saying: my point is about the fact that things we do like going to work, pursuing dreams of building things, and desiring to get married and start families are things that God built into our very beings from the very beginning of creation.  And it is into this that sin brings the greatest fractures and destruction when it appears.

Pain enters the scene in the Bible in Genesis 3.  Adam and Eve have sinned, eaten the fruit of the tree in the garden that God had told them not to, and as punishment God cursed them.  He didn't kill them--the first act of grace--but He did bring punishment upon both of them, relating to the roles God had given them in the world.  Eve's curse was pain in family and relationships:

To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,    and he will rule over you.”--Genesis 3:16

God had gifted them with procreation, the ability to create new life, and in their state of perfection having children would have presumably been an utterly joyous moment* especially in the knowledge that they, as people created in the image of God, are bringing a new person who will be just as much a unique image of their Creator into the world.  Of course, any parent can tell you that certainly, giving birth is always an occasion filled with joy...and any mom will tell you, it is filled with a lot of pain.  More, perhaps, than the average person might consider reasonable, but there you have it.

In that pain, God is giving a signal: "Here comes something that is broken."  That may seem harsh, and I can tell you...I love babies, man.  They're the best.  You give me a baby and I can just sit there and play with him forever and not be bored, because to me it's funny to just watch how everything in the world is absolutely fascinating to them.  But at the same time, any parent, anywhere, will not disagree with this fact: a baby is the most selfish creature on the face of the planet.  It wants what it wants, when it wants it, and if it doesn't get it, well, you're gonna hear about it.  God is saying "Along with this joy, comes difficulty: you have the blessing of raising offspring, of seeing new life from your life grow and mature, but you are going to experience battle after battle along the way."

Adam's curse is on the task God had set before him: instead of a world he is the ruler over being cooperative and unified in desire to obey God's great will, now just as Adam rebelled against God now nature rebels against him:

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”--Genesis 3:17-19

Adam will still work.  He will organize, plant, grow, and eat the fruit of his labor.  But instead of that work being full of the unadulterated joy that comes with oneness with God's purpose, Adam reaps what he's sown: weeds choke out crops; insects, disease and weather attack everything that he's done to feed his family.  And even as we've left the rural life, moved mostly into cities and working in offices, stores, and other places strife and turmoil of various kinds follows.  We work hard to make the best life we can for our families, but debt consumes a large portion of that.  We put in as much time as we can, but the fear of missing out on the lives out our children and growing apart from our spouse presses on us.  And of course, the same troubles of disease and disaster plague us, no matter where or how we live.

And as we go into this, as we fear it coming, as we escape from the latest cycle of frustration and loss, we often find ourselves asking the same question: why?  What are we supposed to be getting out of this?

Probably the best word I've heard used to describe what we get out of the trials of life--if we're listening to God, that is--is brokenness.  We've all heard the phrase "pride goeth before a fall," which is an abbreviation of Proverbs 16:18: "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall."  It's a basic idea most people subscribe to in one way or another as being true, and yet we live in such a way that shows that in our heart of hearts, pride is absolutely a central part of our lives.  We believe that we're good, we're strong, we're smart, and we're capable of getting whatever we want out of life.  We believe that we control our own destinies and that we can be good enough to please God (or whatever version of God we conceive of as pleasing to our whims).  Brokenness, in contrast, is the knowledge that we are not able to achieve what we really want, what we really need to be--which is, to be righteous.  A man is broken when he sees his failures and owns them, and cannot blame another.  But this is not a broken in the sense of "lost."  God breaks us, so that He might put us back together the way we are supposed to be.

“And you said, ‘Behold, the Lord our God has shown us his glory and greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire.  This day we have seen God speak with man, and man still live.  Now therefore why should we die?  For this great fire will consume us.  If we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die....”--Deuteronomy 5:24-25

God took this rebellious, thick-headed bunch of Israelites out of Egypt and spent 40 long, arduous years breaking them: of their attachment to the lives they had as slaves in Egypt, of self-worship and desire for nothing more than a full belly, and makes them His own people.  And when He speaks to them...He scares the hell out of them.  The closer the Israelites get to God for real, the more fear rules over them, because in His presence the incredible reality of their own inadequacies, their sinfulness, their total unworthiness comes to the surface.  It's the reason the prophet Isaiah falls to his face as though he's dead in his vision of the throne of heaven: he knows how incredibly unworthy on his own he is to be in God's presence.


Brokenness is God’s design for us—it is the true, right view of ourselves and God.  “Humility” is a part of it, but not the extent of it.  Brokenness teaches us both our own innate sinfulness, and God’s great holiness, both convicting and uplifting.  I want to borrow some words of wisdom from the "prince of preachers," Charles Spurgeon, that I ran across in doing devotions while working on this:

God’s great design in all His works is the manifestation of His own glory.  Any aim less than this were unworthy of Himself.  But how shall the glory of God be manifested to such fallen creatures as we are?  Man’s eye is not single, he has ever a side glance towards his own honor, has too high an estimate of his own powers, and so is not qualified to behold the glory of the Lord.  It is clear, then, that self must stand out of the way, that there may be room for God to be exalted; and this is the reason why he bringeth his people ofttimes into straits and difficulties, that, being made conscious of their own folly and weakness, they may be fitted to behold the majesty of God when he comes forth to work their deliverance.  He whose life is one even and smooth path, will see but little of the glory of the Lord, for he has few occasions of self-emptying, and hence, but little fitness for being filled with the revelation of God.  They who navigate little streams and shallow creeks, know but little of the God of tempests; but they who do business in great waters, these see his wonders in the deep.

This is why Jesus came walking out to the disciples on the boat while the sea was rough and bad weather was around them; this is why Jesus slept peacefully as the disciples panicked in that boat; this is why Jesus’ parable of the two houses, one built on rock and the other on sand, makes it clear that both houses are hit by the storm.  Jesus desires us to understand that that storm will come, in one form or another, and we all walk through it.  It is not avoiding the storm that God promises, but rather than in passing through it we have a better understanding of who God is and what our relationship with Him is about.  

God allows pain to enter our life to break us of our views of self as good enough, smart enough, able enough. He has given us the capacity and indeed the drive to make plans and build, but He will only endorse His plans and designs. All other things, He either disrupts or allows to continue just long enough to show their futility, and in the process, forms us into a stronger, holier, more Christ-like people. The enemy has his owns designs for these troubles, disruptions, and problems that invade our lives: he desires to drive us to despair, to anxiety, to fear God and/or be angry with Him. God’s plan is to wrest our hands from the controls of life and lead us to trust Him.

Next time: God uses pain to show us that we are not in control.

*I'm not saying that pain as an idea or a sensation didn't exist; after all the verse says that the pains will increase greatly, implying that before it would be much milder.  But I don't want to get bogged down in semantics here or speculation about specifics we probably won't know until we reach a time that blog posts like this are utterly silly in the face of being able to truly know God in a way unimaginable to us today.