Yiddish Proverb: Can’t control wind, only adjust sails

Posted on February 25, 2012 by StriderMTB

There is on old Yiddish proverb that says, “You can’t control the wind but you can adjust your sails.” Would it be safe to say that God doesn’t control the winds of evil, but in his sovereignty He can adjust the world’s sails to use it for possible good? His sovereignty is best understood, not in ordaining all evil, but seeking to overrule it with good. Greg Boyd has a couple insightful remarks on this: “We can be assured that God has a good purpose for every tragic event and yet deny that any tragic event happened for that good purpose…The challenge is to fathom an intelligence so great it has an eternally prepared good purpose for every POSSIBLE event that MIGHT unfold.”

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“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god…”

Posted on February 23, 2012 by StriderMTB

There is a popular atheist quote that has circulated around the net quite a lot. It says,

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” –Stephen F Roberts

I have to admit it is actually pretty slick and catchy…but in the end it just doesn’t reflect well on the atheist’s “all or nothing” reasoning. It seems to imply that all claims to the divine lack consistency and coherency and therefore all differing views can be rejected and subsumed under the same reason. This is very trivial thinking and has little merit. Increasing the range of different, contradictory answers to the actual square root of 144 would not mean that all answers must therefore be wrong, but rather only one can be right. Moreover people believe in polytheism as a worldview for different reasons than people believe in the Christian God. Therefore to reject both would require different reasons. Arguments used against a belief in Hercules, Zeus, Shiva or the tooth fairy cannot be used effectively against the Christian concept of God. There’s really no parallel when the evidence is brought into consideration. I have good reasons for rejecting the ancient Greek pantheon of gods on the grounds that none qualify for the philosophical understanding of what God must be. God—by definition—must be a timeless, spaceless, uncaused, immaterial, self-energizing being of immense power. Hercules nor Santa Clause fit that description. For example you can’t have an infinite regress of events leading backwards into the past. Leading scientific models of the universe agree that the universe began to exist a finite time ago (probably 15 billion years ago if Big Bang cosmology is correct)—and therefore the universe must have a cause. Moreover scientists agree that the origin of the universe is when all space, time, matter and energy came into existence. That means prior to the beginning of the universe there was no existing matter, time, space or energy—i.e. there was nothing. The fact is the cause of the universe MUST be a timeless, spaceless, immaterial, self-energizing entity of immense power. A very apt depiction of the Christian’s view of God! The Big Bang is the greatest evidence for God’s existence simply on scientific grounds—it is creation! To see this developed and successfully argued for in multiple debates against the world’s leading atheists at Harvard, Yale, Oxford visit this site: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=audio_visuals#debates

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Atheism and Morality

Posted on February 23, 2012 by StriderMTB

Atheists like Christopher Hitchens (RIP) and others who think in the same vein will often say their disdain for the God hypothesis is that it posits a celestial dictator that quenches freedom and forces people to love Him or face fiery torments forever in hell. In other words the concept of God is a freedom killer.

I appreciate the value of freedom just as much as an atheist would. So does God–so much so that he endowed created man with autonomy and refuses to run rough-shod over people’s will and coerce them into loving him. In fact God has gone to great lengths to extend love that is free to be rejected. God knew there can be no true love and obedience unless there is the freedom to spurn love and disobey. Hell is ultimately God honoring people’s freedom and giving them what they want–i.e. not God. (BTW Hell is not a perpetual burning inferno of God’s revenge. We shouldn’t let medieval theology turn us off too much).

But getting back to freedom Dostoevsky’s famous skeptic character rightly concludes: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” In that sense the absence of God would truly result in unlimited freedom–if we understand freedom to mean unrestrained actions in which all things are permissible, nothing is prohibited and nothing is condemned as objectively wrong. But is that a free world you would enjoy? Probably not.

Yet an inescapable philosophical problem for atheism is that it can’t provide a foundation for objective moral values or moral obligation. You can’t go from an IS to an OUGHT without introducing an authority from the outside. But in atheism the world just IS what it happened to evolve into and you can’t get to the OUGHT of objective morality from molecules colliding together in a purposeless, amoral, materialistic soup of bio-genesis.

At most a person in an atheistic universe who rapes and steals is merely flaunting his evolved social customs and threatening the cohesive harmony of his society. But that would only push the question back further to “why is it morally wrong to threaten the cohesive harmony of one’s society?” It may be stupid but we can’t say it is evil. At most he is acting unfashionably and has bad manners in respect to the rest of his human “herd” but we couldn’t say he is doing anything objectively wrong. And it is the “oughts” of this world that gives freedom its only true haven–but the atheist has to borrow from the theist to live there philosophically.

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Christmas is Rescue for the World!

Posted on December 25, 2011 by StriderMTB

Christmas lights, decorative trees, and of course fat Santa, has increasingly become part of the festive fabric of both Cambodia and Thailand. Attempting to explain the truest meaning of Christ-mas to those who literally know nothing of Christ puts it in a refined perspective. For even they agree it would have been quite silly and absurd for God to have sent His Son into the world merely because He thought it needed another holiday–“Just look at those poor chaps Jesus. They look like they could use another jolly day off life. I’m thinking something with ornaments this time…You wanna go take care of that Son?”  The FIRST Christmas was more about rescue than ribbons, wreaths and reindeer. He came, He saw, He assumed our judgment and conquered the grave because he saw racism, greed, Crusades, Auschwitz and Tuel Slang slimed all over our hearts. It’s because of that inconvenient truth that there needed to be a first Christmas in the first place… lest we forget.

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Charles Spurgeon: “Do something!” John Piper: “Worship is Lacking!”

Posted on December 21, 2011 by StriderMTB

In one of his sermons Charles Spurgeon gave the following charge to future preacher boys, “Brethren, do something; do something; DO SOMETHING. While Committees waste their time over resolutions, do something. While Societies and Unions are making constitutions, let us win souls. Too often we discuss, and discuss, and discuss, while Satan only laughs in his sleeve… Get to work.”

I absolutely love this quote! Spurgeon is a bit of an enigma to me in many ways. He had wonderful, inspiring, truth-filled sermons that packed a punch. Yet on the other hand he suffered severely from Calvinism’s incurable malady of  cognitive dissonance–which is more or less the holding of conflicting beliefs such that an individual can only opt for one in any given moment. For example Spurgeon’s Calvinism dictates the belief that if certain Christians don’t “do something” that they ought to do, it is ultimately because God predetermined that they not do it! Their choosing “not to” is merely the effect in time of God’s prior choice of what they would or would not desire to do. In Calvinism, Luther’s famous “bondage of the will” is nothing less than man’s bondage to God’s decretive, determining will. On the other hand Spurgeon’s pastoral heart feels an urgency to “win souls” (a very Arminian term) as if God’s mission to reach the lost is either accelerated or delayed depending on the free-will obedience of those he calls his “co-laborers.”

Saying our “obedience” is merely the means by which God accomplishes his predetermined will doesn’t help the Calvinist gain an iota of credibility. For in Calvinism God determines whether Christians will obey or disobey him in every given situation of life! It is absurd to think that God genuinely longs for and calls out for obedience while at the same time determining who and who will not obey him behind the “sovereign curtain” of his decree.

I also admire the passionate oratory of certain statements by John Piper. However he is the epitome of Calvinistic cognitive dissonance. A supreme example is his missions book, “Let the nations be glad! The  Supremacy of God in Missions.” The central thesis of Piper’s book is,

“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exist because worship doesn’t.”

Bravo! Kudos! And yet it is at this point that I want to slap Piper upside the head (gently) and plead for common sense to break through the foggy incoherency of his Calvinism. “Yes John! The necessity of missions is due to a lack of worship in the earth. But who determined that? Your theology requires you to hold that God determines who will worship and who will not worship him!”

It is inescapable that in Calvinism’s divine panorama we find God unilaterally decreeing the very lack of worship Piper sees as a regress that must be addressed. Cognitive dissonance par excellence.

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God’s Heart for the Poor

Posted on December 20, 2011 by StriderMTB

One of the most beautiful descriptions of God’s heart for the poor is found in Psalm 72:12-14. “For he will rescue the poor who cry out and the afflicted who have no helper. He will have pity on the poor and helpless and save the lives of the poor. He will redeem them from oppression and violence, for their lives are precious in his sight.” 

As the body of Christ we are called to be a reflection of the heart of Christ. In essence we are called to be reflective mirrors of Someone far more beautiful than us. When the world looks at our activities, our interests and our weekly routine of worship and obedience, does it see a reflection of God’s heart? Does it see that the lives of this world’s poor and helpless “are  precious in [our] sight” at they are in his sight?”

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With joy He endured the cross

Posted on December 15, 2011 by StriderMTB

Hebrews 12:2 says “Jesus…for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of God’s throne.” Some attempt to interprete the “joy set before him” as being his own glory or sitting on heaven’s throne of glory. However this misses the mark entirely. Isaiah states, “A child is born, a Son is given.” It is the child who is born. The Son is not born–the Son eternally existed. Christ chose to take on human skin and move into our earthly neighborhood for the purpose of rescue, redemption and reconciliation. That being said, the “joy set before him” can’t be going back to heaven’s throne. He came from heaven! Why would “he endure the cross” to only go back to heaven’s throne? Rather the “the joy set before him” is best understood as being the knowledge that it would be through his self-sacrifice that a path of reconciliation would be afforded to you and I–and all sinners. Christ knew that his death would be a channel of blessing for a condemned humanity.

A few scriptures bear out that Christ’s joy should be seen in terms of knowing that salvation and freedom would come to those in the world who repent. In Luke 15 we find the religious Pharisee crowd to be offended and disgusted that Jesus would open his heart and life to the dredges of society, charging, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them!”

In response Jesus shares 3 parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. In each parable the central point is joy–in particular God’s joy over sinner’s who are lost being reconciled to Him. One of the most precious statements in all of scripture is found within the context of these 3 parables. “I tell you, in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who don’t need repentance” (Lk. 15:7).

“For the joy set before him he endured the cross…”  “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents…” The connection can’t be missed!

 

 

 

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