Who am I? Part II

It is easier to have an experience than to explain it and it is easier to explain away an experience when you have not had it and are not interested, than to be confronted by it. Conveniently explaining away something is the best way to maintain stasis, that is to remain unchanged. Normally, human beings (and plants and animals) do not seek change unless the stress of the current circumstances force us to seek new directions or we find ourselves, in an instant, confronted with something that is so plainly superior that it demands attention.

I had been raised in the Lutheran church and we were a religious family, and I was perhaps the most so. So, when I entered college, I was very comfortable with where I was. Intellectually religious and aware of Reformation doctrine, and though not yet seventeen, I was thoroughly capable of debate in any matter religious, political or philosophical, or so it seemed to me. I was a debater and combative by nature.

Actually, though, I had had only a cursory interest in the campus Christian organization - the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. My interest was the same as my interest had been in high school - chess. There was a player at the school who would eventually become a grandmaster who I wanted to see play and hoped eventually to play. Actually, I was totally outclassed by him, but my vanity had the best of me.

Perhaps, some of you who know the game might and what "chess for blood" means, might ask how I could justify playing the most violent game ever devised by men and still consider myself a Christian (for those of you who don't get it, most highly physical sports go to the punishment of the body until it can no longer go on or can no longer go on, psyching out the opponent(s) being part of the process, but competitive chess bypasses the body and goes straight for the heart, the mind, the soul - it has no interest in the submission of the body, its purpose being to subdue the soul.

The point is, that if you submit to your religion on an intellectual level, you can detach your spiritual, emotional and moral decision from your religion in your actual life. That is why so much ill has been done by people who have accounted themselves Christians.

As it turned out, during the course of my college career I was not free to attend the chess club due to programming conflicts, until my interest waned. On the other hand, most semesters I was free to go to IVCF.

It was there that I became acutely aware that there were people there who were different from me. It wasn't so much in doctrine as in a vitality that I was unaware existed. They had a kind of life I was missing. They would say they were born again and certainly, there was something about them that did not equate to religion though they had there own share of it.

I suppose that if I had not been so religious, I would have guessed it was religion at work, but you can't convince a blacksmith that lace has been made upon an anvil. So it is that when a man, woman or child comes to Christ and is born from above, it is not a religious experience, is an encounter with the living God. Mine came several months later.

Some of you may object.

If God is Good, Why Much Evil in the World? - Part IV

If you were God, choosing a redemptive plan would cause you a number of problems, not the least of being that a free will means that whatever plan you would choose would be unacceptable to some or even most. It is not even clear that any plan would be able to retrieve more than a small percentage of those who were lost. Short of a general amnesty which would lead to unrestricted evil in the present world ( for there would be no fear of ultimate consequences), there would have to be conditions on that redemption. What conditions would you set?

One thing is certain. Any conditions you would choose would be considered unfair to many, if not most. You could not possibly choose a redemptive plan based on the opinions of others, for free will means a mind that is free to reason, rightly or wrongly, meaning that there would be many different and conflicting ideas that would be floated about.

But more to the point, one cannot go about, willy-nilly, creating a universe, without a plan to begin with. We find in the Bible that God has made His redemptive plan based on two major principles - righteousness and love. (It should be said here that any plan that includes these will be heavily criticized by those who would prefer another definition of either or are just disinterested in putting in the effort to obtain them).

While many criticize the biblical presentation of righteousness in this point or that, the real problem that people have with God's definition of righteousness is we would rather have one that excludes the things that we would prefer to do and would declare it as harmless or even virtuous.

Secondly, many dislike, if not despise, the biblical teaching that once man has gotten into his moral morass, he cannot extricate himself. We would like to believe that if we turn over a new leaf, that that which was done in the past has no further claim on us.

While this is not true, the thought that presses this argument has some merit. The past has to be taken off the table if a new life is to be begun. But how do you un-murder someone, stop the ill done by gossip or perjury? You cannot give someone back their life, no matter how much you wish to. After you have robbed a person's home, how do you give them back the security that they felt before, when within its walls? Giving the money back certainly does not help, even if you give back double what you stole.

All that the Bible calls sin can be analyzed in a similar way. But not all the sins are committed against one another, some of them are directed toward God. But the ones that are directed against one another are also indirectly done toward God because He has told us not to do them.

Time and numbers create a world full of evil. As a people age, they learn more and more ways to do evil to one another. Have you ever noticed how quickly put-downs go into general use? Words like "nerd" and "geek" took only a few years to go into general usage. Or that old put-downs often go on forever? If they are short and, perhaps, descriptive, they may go on for centuries or even millenia. And the ways to physically hurt, torture or kill another have certainly not declined with time - nor stayed the same, for that matter.

Putting the blame on God for giving us the free will that allows us to do good, but which also is the source of our personal evils, is denying human culpability and responsibility. We may well wonder why men, women and children all try to get out of their responsibility for what they have done. We want to escape the consequences that come with our transgressions

against one another and God. We may deny it up and down, but we are sinners who need redemption.

Redeeming ourselves is not possible because the very same mindset that has made us who we are becomes the judge of the degree of responsibility that we have, and as I have said, we downplay our own culpability. We blame God and others for the conditions that surround us and claim personal responsibility only for that guilt we are aware of at the moment, while continuing to bury from our consciousness the rest.

We need a redeemer, a savior, a deliverer, a transformer, and of those who have walked this earth through time, only Jesus Christ is able to do that.

If God is Good, Why Much Evil in the World? -Part III

If you were God, getting ready to create a universe ( or many, for that matter), you would have to make several decisions. First, would you want to have the conditions in the universe that you are creating which would make it suitable for life? Second, what kind of life? Living things that are unaware that they are alive? Living things that are robotic, going about aware of themselves, but totally pre-programmed? Living things that may choose their behaviors, but lacking knowledge of morality? Living things that may choose their behaviors, having morality, but incapable of knowing or expressing love? Or living beings that may choose their behaviors, knowing right from wrong and capable of love?

The problem with creating creatures that can love in the highest sense is that they need free will to do so. But the free will to love, also means the free will not to. And if you choose not to, there will be indifference or hatred in its place. There can be no vacuum here.

So God could not create a universe in which love could be known, without allowing for the possibility of evil. For to say that a being that has no choice but to love is to say something meaningless. You need to be free to love, free to accept love.

The problem is that evil is ensnaring and addictive, because, at its heart, sin is deciding against God and for self alone. Once one has committed evil, it gives a false sense of empowerment - at first. Then it becomes addictive to one degree or another. Everyone has some "besetting sin," a sin or group of sins that he or she cannot shake, nor of ones own will give up. Ultimately, I do not have the sin, the sin has me, and, isolated from God by it, I become its slave. The Bible says that we are sold unto sin.

It also says that God foresaw this "before the foundations of the world." Humanity would need to be redeemed and delivered - but then there was that sticky point of free will. More...

If God is Good, Why Much Evil in the World? -Part II

When we try to understand God, we almost always look at Him horizontally. By that I mean that we look at Him from our point in time and our point of view. It is the way that we look at most people and it is not surprising that we would do the same with God. We ask questions that have no view to the way He is, but rather to the questions we have. Our expectation is that when we use this approach, sooner or later we will be able to find a valid answer.

The problem is that we see things with a view to time, or as the physicists would say, space-time. But the Bible tells us that God created time, that he existed before time. it is hard to get a handle on what that means or how you can exist apart from time. But the physicists agree, that time began when the universe began, and whether you are a Christian, a Jew, a Moslem, a deist, an agnostic or an atheist, you come to a barrier at the beginning of the universe.

The universe had to begin with flux, that is, change. One moment it was not, then it was. This is change. But change always requires time when we talk of material things, but time was not yet created. It was about to come into being. How then the flux ?

But, not only was there flux, there was velocity, acceleration. Whatever God lives in supersedes time. It has properties that are like time in some ways, but are not attached to our universe. The Bible says that He inhabits eternity and I think that eternity is not endless time, but the time substitute that God lives in, which, in fact, is endless.

Creating a universe from nothing is not as easy as it may seem. It requires thought: not just ideas, but wisdom. Before I go on, why not take a moment to decide what would need to be decided? Even if you are not a believer in God, this is an exercise that you can participate in. Determine what your thoughts are and then I will share mine.

If God is Good, Why Much Evil in the World? -Part I

This is a question that is so often asked by atheists and has had quite a resurgence in the past few years. It is a question that most of us have a hard time coming up with an answer for. Generally, I do not think that it is profitable to speak with most modern and postmodern atheists because it seems that they live lives of one objection after another. If you give them a reasonable answer to one objection, they have another and another, ad infinitum. When it comes to the truth, they are like lions for cherries.

What they really do is proselytize - spread the bad news. There message is that life was created without meaning, is meaningless, so enjoy it if you can. One can only wonder why anyone would want to spread such a message. But the "new atheists," imagine that it is for our own good that we embrace the emptiness of it all. Cheerful sorts, aren't they?

But I do think that we ought to have firm in our own minds that there are answers for their objections and that just because you may not have an answer at the moment, doesn't mean that one does not exist.

I recall that when I was in college, one of the young men who had been raised in a Christian home had decided that he did not want to be a Christian anymore. He was young and handsome and the Christian life was getting in the way of a number of interesting temptations. When I asked him why he was taking the path he was taking, he said that there were a number of questions that he could not answer and that he was sure lead to the conclusion that God did not exist. Two of them seemed particularly inane and I had thought, until recently, had died a proper death, but they are around again. Perhaps, they have never disappeared, but have been merely below my radar.

They are similar. "Can God create a rock so large that He cannot lift it?, and, Can Good create a ladder so tall He cannot climb it? The supposed point is that no matter how you answer it, God is not omnipotent - he can't do anything He wants.

The problem falls apart on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that when we say that God is omnipotent we do not mean that He can do anything. As Balaam put it, God is not a man that he can lie..." He cannot do foolish things, nor things that are contrary to His nature - or the nature of matter, for that matter. God is not finite and mass is not infinite. The rock must collapse into a singularity long before it is too large for God to lift it. Furthermore, God does not lift things, he moves things according to His will and creativity. If He is omnipresent, He is on both ends of the ladder no matter how large it gets. These "problems" propose a rather small god, not the God of the scripture. They are arguments made by the ignorant to boost their own position and discomfort their opponents.

We must remember that the Bible teaches us that men live their lives in personal dishonesty and tend to get extremely angry when you tell them so. Like the pigs who built their homes of straw and sticks, they believe that their arguments will protect them from the wolf in their existences -God. Our problem is that we sometimes see their flimsy arguments as houses of brick, not realizing that God is not a wolf - he is more like a wrecking ball for hollow arguments.

The "evil in the world" argument is hardly better than the others, though better constructed. So let's take a look at it in Part II.

Nevertheless I Live, Part III

So, then, this is the thing - to abandon your faith for His.

Of course, this does not come all at once. The answer to the old riddle, "How do you swallow an elephant," is "One piece at a time." But, what you can do for the moment is to determine that when there is a conflict between what you believe and what Jesus believed, that he is not the one who is wrong. When Paul says eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered in to the hearts of men the things that God has prepared for those who love Him, he is saying that the way that God thinks is different than the way we think. if we are going to find open windows into the heart and mind of God, we are going to have to concede that we cannot know Him without His help. God did not decide that His Spirit would lead and guide us into "all truth" because He didn't want to take a chance that we might make a mistake or two. It was because it is absolutely necessary. Left to our own hearts, our own minds, we go hopelessly astray.

Just how much do you suppose that you know about God? Each of us come to Christ with our own imaginations, our own guesses about God and how He is or should be. Where did we get these notions from? Rumor? A child's-eye view from Sunday School? A Bible Story book? Or is it something that we have cooked up in our own brains as to what God " ought" to be like? Maybe a little of each?

One thing is certain. God has always been what He is since longer than I have been.

But, if in the middle of my crisis of faith, I ask the question, "What did Jesus believe?," and rest in it when I cannot find my way, sooner or later I will come out of the mist that blocks my view and find that His way was not merely a good, not merely a better way, but the best and only true way. As He said, "I am the way... (John 14:6a)

And there is a great benefit to this: for when I find that His way works, that his way is the best, I have no reason to return to my own. Further, what we believe rules us, so that when we embrace his faith, our lives are transformed. We will live and think in a new and living way we never had thought of before. As Paul says, our minds must be renewed. (Romans 12:2)

" Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:

6, Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery

to be equal with God: 7, But made himself of no reputation,

and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made

in the likeness of men: 8, And being found in fashion as a

man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,

even the death of the cross." - Phillipians 2:5-6.

It's all easy to say, but the doing of it is the thing. It says, "Let." That means that there is a choice to be made We need to allow God to put His mind in us. That is the great act of faith.

For some of us this comes easier than for others. Our stubbornness, our ignorance, our misunderstandings stand in our way. Sometimes it is more our stubbornness than anything. We came to Jesus for relief and release from our sin and its consequences, but we did not exactly sign on for the tough stuff. When we read passages like this, we imagine that this was meant for others - those with stronger constitutions, for those who are braver. We can sit on the sidelines for most of our Christian lives because we are convinced that this scripture was made for others. And so, we live out our Christian lives in disappointment and frustration. it wasn't meant to be that way.

Nevertheless I live, Part II

(If you haven't read Part I first, this is going to be hard to follow. Please go back to the previous blog - it is not very long).

When we look at the two possible meanings, we need to find the onus - who is responsible for bringing Paul to where He is when he is writing this letter.

The verse makes it very easy. There are only two who are mentioned in the passage - Paul and Jesus, the Son of God.

So, Paul, or I (or you) are responsible for our faith in Christ and if we can find enough faith, believe hard enough, then we can have a successful Christian life and live in Jesus' love and sacrifice and our Christian lives will forever be tied up in our own limitations. I will forever be going around telling myself, "If only I could believe a little more," and punishing myself for not having been able to do so. I know that some teach that faith is an act of the will, but have you ever tried to increase your faith by a sheer act of your will? Doesn't work very well, does it? Well, at least not for me. But, where do I find more faith? Read the Bible more? Yes, but it depends on where you read and what you are searching for when you read.

Have you ever tried quoting Bible verses back to God to try to get Him to do what you want? That doesn't work very well either, most of the time. When it does it is because your heart has become His heart in the matter at hand.

No, living by the faith of the Son of God is what is required. Asking the question, "What did Jesus believe about the things before me?," then getting behind what He believed. Jesus said, "If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you. " If that's not working for you, it is because His words have not yet come to abide in you. You may say you know the words "by heart," when you have merely memorized them. More...