Terror in the Night

I had a dream that made me afraid. As I was lying in my bed, the images and visions that passed through my mind terrified me. (Daniel 4:5 NIV)

Recently I attended a men's retreat and, during one of the discussion groups, the following question was on a list for comment topics: "when was the time in your life when you felt farthest from God?" I had nothing to say at the time, but later the question came to mind as I wrestled with sleeplessness late that night.

Periodic insomnia is a curse I inherited from my father, though thankfully not to the degree he suffered from it. All through the decade of my 40's, long estranged from God and fellow believers, and deeply ambivalent as to the truth of Christianity, I would lie awake during my occasional bouts at the darkest and loneliest time of night--2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. At all other times of the day and night I was successful in pushing away the question of my eternity, but not then. A sense of dread and even terror would descend on me as I examined myself. I could feel my life slipping away from me, as if through my fingers. My thoughts would range far and wide, sometimes never coalescing into anything other than my sense of dread, but often they centered around my abandonment of God and the question of faith. If God didn't exist, my life was meaningless, hopeless, and inexorably leeching away. If God did exist, I was wasting my only opportunity to secure my relationship with him.

Despite the horror of those experiences, I never once awakened my wife in bed next to me, but lay there alone in my dread, heart pounding, sometimes sweating, sometimes chilled to the bone. It was then that I felt farthest from God, utterly cut off from his presence. Eventually I would fall asleep, and when I would awake the next morning, the terror of the night before would be pushed aside as I got on with the day.

On this sleepless night at the retreat, however, it occurred to me that ever since I had reconciled with God, I no longer experienced these night terrors. Sleeplessness had become an opportunity for prayer; self-examination an occasion for resolve and hope. Because I am confident in God's existence, his forgiveness, and his presence, I'm no longer tortured by the anxieties that once plagued me.

To Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the other new breed of activists atheists, this phenomenon is a sign of the mental weakness of Christians, religion as a psychological "crutch", or surrogate father figure as Sigmund Freud asserted in his writings. The folly of this theory is clear when one asks how the three Christian men who were horribly tortured for three hours before having their throats slit by Islamic fanatics in Malatya, Turkey last week were made more psychologically "comfortable" by their Christian faith. Here is a link to the story, but be warned: the appalling medieval atrocities committed on their bodies is sickening. Even discounting the kind of persecution endured by Christians in other countries, there is the social exclusion and contempt from non-believing friends, and even family, that Jesus warned would be the cost of discipleship.

If the world hates you, you know that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own. But because you do not belong to the world and I have chosen you out of it, the world will hate you. Do you remember what I said to you, 'The servant is not greater than his master'? If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you as well... (John15:18-20 Phillips translation)

The point is that as Christians we have hope: the assurance of God's forgiveness and an eternal existence with him. We also have the promise of peace of mind, whether in the midst of horrible persecution such as those even now experienced by so many believers in other countries, or the everyday doubts, or snubs, or social insults we may face in the relative safety of the United States.

No temptation has come your way that is too hard for flesh and blood to bear. But God can be trusted not to allow you to suffer any temptation beyond your powers of endurance. He will see to it that every temptation has a way out, so that it will never be impossible for you to bear it. (I Corinthians 10:13 Phillips translation)

We even have peace of mind during those sleepness nights when the inevitable questions arise about the direction of our lives, career, finances and accomplishments.

Don't worry over anything whatever; tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6,7 Phillips translation)

Why?

Thus they became fatuous in their argumentations, and plunged their silly minds still further into the dark. Behind a facade of "wisdom" they became just fools, fools who would exchange the glory of the eternal God for an imitation image of a mortal man, or of creatures that run or fly or crawl. They gave up God: and therefore God gave them up - (Romans 1:21-24 Phillips translation)

With the atrocity that happened at Virginia Tech at the hands of Cho Seung-Hui, many are asking, "why?" For those who believe in a sovereign God, this and a thousand other acts of human evil can be a test of that faith.

But the fact is that it is only from a place of faith in a sovereign God that the question has any meaning. To ask the question is to first borrow a whole set of presuppositions and system of values that come to us only through the God-revealed truth of Scripture.

In a Darwinian, godless universe, human beings, the human mind, and all our social constructs are the product of evolution for the expedience of survival. "Good" and "Bad" don't really exist objectively, they are merely illusions of social convention, the result of myth that worked themselves out from the dreams of slowly progressing social orders (bands, tribes, cities, nations, civilizations, religions, etc.) In this Darwinian worldview, "good" and "bad" should be replaced by "successful" and "unsuccessful," for those are the only real criteria for existence. The question "why?" in any sort of moral sense, has no meaning. This was merely another unsuccessful variant of evolutionary social process. Feel whatever rage, sorrow, or pity you like, but realize that those feelings are nothing but the interactions of chemicals and electrical impulses in your brain. Free will itself, becomes an illusion from this perspective. What humans subjectively think of as "choices" they make, are in reality nothing more than the effects of external causes, a type of Newtonian physics of action and reaction on a social level, or the mechanistic workings of biological drives and imperatives.

If you are stirred with compassion for the loved ones of those killed, outraged at this act of evil, and grieved to ask how a loving God could allow it, know that in the asking, you are, at least tacitly, assenting to God's law, "you shall not murder" as an objective moral truth.

Spiritual

"Sir," said the woman again, "I can see that you are a prophet! Now our ancestors worshipped on this hill-side, but you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship -"
"Believe me," returned Jesus, "the time is coming when worshipping the Father will not be a matter of 'on this hill-side' or 'in Jerusalem'. Nowadays you are worshipping with your eyes shut. We Jews are worshipping with our eyes open, for the salvation of mankind is to come from our race. Yet the time is coming, yes, and has already come, when true worshippers will worship in spirit and in reality. Indeed, the Father looks for men who will worship him like that. God is spirit, and those who worship him can only worship in spirit and in reality." (John 4:20-24 Phillips translation)

It has become fashionable these days to say, "I'm not religious, but I'm a 'spiritual' person." The problem with this, of course, is that few who make such statements could begin to define what they mean by "spiritual." Often it's used as a shield to hide behind, a way to avoid any serious question of faith, God, and human responsibility. Commonly the statement is followed with, "I just don't like organized religion," and finished off with, "more people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other cause," after which they nod with self-satisfaction, and the assurance that they are justly absolved from any further consideration of anything deemed "religious."

Even academics employ this verbal tactic. Francis Schaeffer wrote about this maneuver among the "new" theologians in his book The God Who is There:

But in the new theology, use is made of certain religious words which have a connotation of personality and meaning to those who hear them. Real communication is not in fact established, but an illusion of communication is given by employing words rich in connotation...So when the new theology uses such words, without definition, an illusion of meaning is given which is pragmatically useful in arousing deep motivations.

This is something beyond emotion. An illusion of communication and content is given so that, when a word is used in this deliberately undefined way, the hearer 'thinks' he knows what it means. (pg. 56,57)


The Bible tells us very specific things about the nature of spirit, so as Christians, if we are Biblically literate, when we speak about our spirit, or God being a spirit, or "spiritual" things, we have a clear set of properties and attributes in mind: non-material, invisible, eternal, yet containing the true essence, personality, and constitution of the individual. When we read that Jesus said, "God is spirit," we understand that he is telling us that God is not a physical, material, and finite being but rather an eternal, supernatural, and transcendent being; that when he said those who worship God must worship Him, "in spirit and in reality," he meant we must worship God not just in physical, material ways, but also by engaging our essential being in faith--not just going through the motions, but in reality.

Perhaps the next time someone tells you he or she is not religious, but is a "spiritual" person, challenge them to define "spiritual" for you. And then respectfully confront them with the Biblical meaning of spiritual: to worship the one, true, and personal God, "in spirit and in truth."

Perspective

Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:20,21 ESV)

I recently overheard a discussion between two women, one who is a professed Christian, the other who is not. The nonbeliever had started by saying she was "praying to God" that she and her husband would get the house they are trying to buy. When the Christian woman tried to explain the necessity of having a relationship with God for prayer to be effective, the nonbeliever bristled and said, "I pray to God all the time and he never answers my prayers!"

The absurdity of praying "all the time" to God, whom you believe "never" answers your prayers aside, the human tendency to blame God for everything bad that happens, yet fail to give Him credit and gratitude for anything good, is pretty much universal. Much of this attitude is a defense mechanism, a way to justify one's refusal to submit to God. Why submit to God when He is so cruel as to allow all these bad things to happen to us? Many, as Dostoyevsky wrote of his character Ivan in the The Brothers Karamazov use it as a rationale for denying the existence of God: "I renounce the higher harmony altogether," declared Ivan. "It's not worth the tears of...one tortured child."

C.S. Lewis dealt at length with this question in his (highly recommended) book The Problem of Pain. He starts chapter 2 this way:

"If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.

This is not the place to re-state Lewis' arguments; I couldn't hope to match his eloquence and brilliance anyway. I'll just commend the book to all. But I would like to make the point that much of our struggle with this question, even as believers, is due to perspective: ours, as finite and mortal, is so limited.

The passage beginning this piece is probably the most quoted from the book of Job. And, while verse 22 tells us that, in all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong, a careful reading shows that Job went on to vigorously "blame" God for the evil that had befallen him and others (see 9:23-24; 10:8,16,20; 21:17-26, 30-32; 24:1-12; 30:21), for which God roundly rebuked him.

Most of God's rebuke to Job is in the form of questions concerning the majesty and complexity of creation, but in 40:8 He says, "Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?" (NIV) Of course this is exactly what most humans do who seek to escape surrender to God. But even those who have surrendered to God fall to the temptation of "blaming" Him for the evil that transpires in their lives.

To Job's accusation that God was responsible for his misery, God's answer seems to be that he should keep his mouth shut because he was speaking about the nature of reality whose vast complexity he was completely incapable of comprehending. When Job is given a glimpse of this divine perspective through God's discourse, he says, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." (Job 42:3 NIV)

When I first overheard the woman's complaint that God "never" answered her prayers, I was tempted to say, "sure He did; He answered every one of them...with, 'NO!'" Such a frivolous statement would have done more harm than good, but there is a kernel of truth to it in that what we often conceive as divine silence, or worse, indifference, is always simply a lack of understanding or limited perspective of the reality. We make demands of God, or draw conclusions about His nature based on our desires and expedience.

In the Gospel of Mark we are told when Jesus was before the Sanhedrin, after they had condemned him as deserving death, some began to spit on him and to cover his face and to strike him, saying to him "Prophesy!" (Mark 14:65 ESV) Take note: they demanded a prophesy, not of honest motives, but from their own private incentive to mock and debase Jesus, and vindicate themselves. At perhaps precisely this instant, below in the courtyard, a prophesy of Jesus is fulfilled as Peter, at the insistence of bystanders that he must be a follower of Jesus, began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, "I do not know this man of whom you speak." And immediately the rooster crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, "Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times." And he broke down and wept. (Mark 14:71,72 ESV)

Here, we too, like Job are given a glimpse of the divine perspective. Those who sarcastically demanded a prophesy from Jesus reveled in their perception of his failure, but from God's perspective their request was all too tragically granted.

New skin

"Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved." (Matthew 9:17 ESV)

This parable was told by Jesus to disciples of John the Baptist who questioned him as to why Jesus' disciples, unlike John's disciples and the Pharisees, did not fast. It was also right on the heels of Jesus answering the criticism of Pharisees for his fraternizing with "tax collectors and sinners," after he ate at Matthew's house.

The Pharisees (which means literally, the separated) were a sect of pious Jews that arose as a response to the Hellenization of Jewish culture after the Macedonian conquest by Alexander and the ensuing diaspora. The extreme apartheid character of Pharisaic practice and teaching was instrumental in preserving Hebrew identity, language and cohesion, and we can probably thank that system for the continuity and rigorous conservation of the foundational scriptures (or in Protestant terms, the "Old Testament"). But the drawback can be seen in conditions at the Temple to which Jesus would later react in his only display of violence when he overturned the moneylender's tables and drove out the animals installed there for sale. The key to his indignation can be found in his statement, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you make it a den of robbers." (Matthew 21:13 ESV) The place where all this buying, selling, and money-changing was going on was the outer court of the Temple, called The Court of the Gentiles, named so because this was supposed to be where Gentiles "who feared God," as we read in a number of places in the New Testament, such as the Centurion who came to Jesus and requested healing for his sick daughter (Luke 7), and Cornelius whom God spoke to host Peter (Acts 10), would be able to gather and pray, hear teaching of the Law, and participate in worship of the one true God.

In his most recent book, Cities of God; the real story of how Christianity became an urban movement and conquered Rome, Rodney Stark recounts how this was common, and indeed many people of the day found Jewish monotheism compelling, and converted to a degree, worshipping, attending synagog, but unwilling to undergo circumcision and other aspects of the Law. This relegated them to a second-class and marginal rank within Jewish religious life.

The Court of the Gentiles was meant to be that place in the Temple where Isaiah's proclamation could be realized, "I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." (Isaiah 49:6 ESV), but Pharisaic apartheid, and commercial opportunity had crowded it out. This is what infuriated Jesus.

In the parable of the wineskins Jesus refers to the practice of that time and region of fermenting wine in skins, rather than casks or tanks as we do today. As the wine ferments the living cultures produce gasses that make its volume expand. A new skin will expand with its volume of wine, but an old skin has already gone through the expansion process; it will rupture if subjected to the expansion required by a new fermentation.

Two lessons come to mind from this illustration. The first, on a macro scale, is that Jewish religious life, in its effort to save Hebrew culture and identity, had become so rigid and exclusionary that it could never be the vehicle through which God could fulfill the prophesy of Isaiah. A new "skin" was necessary to contain the new message. The second lesson is on the micro, or the personal level if you will; and that is that the individual must be a new person to contain the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus told Nicodemus, "...unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3 ESV), and Paul said, For if a man is in Christ he becomes a new person altogether--the past is finished and gone, everything has become fresh and new. (II Corinthians 5:17 Phillips translation) Why? Because our old natures are too brittle and unyielding; it's necessary to have a "new skin" that can expand and take the shape of that which is within. But all of us who are Christians have no veils on our faces, but reflect like mirrors the glory of the Lord. We are transfigured in ever-increasing splendor into his own image, and the transformation comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (II Corinthians 3:18 Phillips translation)

How much is that doggy in the window?

He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!" (Matthew 12:11,12 ESV)

One of my cultural heros, long time lecturer, writer, and talk radio host Dennis Prager has, for over twenty years, posed a hypothetical situation to groups to whom he has lectured that goes something like this: If you were passing by a lake and found that your beloved pet--dog or cat--and a person who was a complete stranger to you were both drowning, and you could only save one, and in doing so the other would certainly drown, whom would you save? Dennis says that over all the years he has posed this question the percentage of people, whether young or old, who answer that they would save their pet and let the stranger die has remained fairly consistent at about 60% to 65%.

Some of this can possibly be attributed to the urbanization of the United States over the last century: the farther away from the farm one gets, the easier it is to anthropomorphize animals, I suppose. But I attribute more of this trend to the decline of Christian moral truth as an influence to American law and culture. To be sure this cavalier attitude to human life is nothing new. Consider the ancient Chinese practice of deferring to name children until age two, for example. But this custom, generally credited to the high infant mortality rate and their reluctance to emotionally bond with a child who might then die, I would rather contend was a direct result of their worldview which based its value on human life relative to its utility.

A mere cursory review of human history can demonstrate that the Judeo/Christian value placed on human life is unique. Even Hinduism, with its image in the Western mind of non-violence and respect for all life, leads to a caste system and the horrors experienced by the Sudra (the "untouchable") caste, or Krishna persuading Arjuna to do his caste duty of killing his relatives in war, for the indwelling soul neither kills nor is killed (Bhagavad-Gita, II. 17-22).

The American trend of abandoning our legal and cultural definition of human life based on Biblical moral truth, to a secular/humanist view of utilitarianism, has lead not only to the distortion of our values--as the above Dennis Prager anecdote demonstrates--but also to the appalling rate of abortion, exceeding that of many European countries. Whatever direction our government takes on these issues, it's imperative that the Church remain steadfast to Biblical truth that man is not an animal, but rather a unique creation of God, made in His own image, and therefore due an intrinsic worth and dignity commensurate with that fact.

Imitation is the sincerest form of...Worship

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as
Christ loved us and gave himself up for us... (Eph. 5:1 ESV)

I have played guitar since age 11--over 40 years now. At about age 30 I discovered jazz and began the arduous task of learning to improvise. As I explored the literature on the subject I found there were two main theories. One was the chord/scale approach. This is very much in vogue today; it's taught in most of the university jazz departments and consists of learning various scales that relate to the chords that make up the harmonic structure of the song. The idea is to practice these scales against their corresponding chords, and eventually use notes from those scales to create improvised melodies. The second theory is much older and was the way most of the musicians who created the jazz lexicon learned to play: it is to transcribe the solos of admired masters and learn to play them. To put it simply: it is to imitate one's heros.

I could go on at great length about why I think the older "imitation" system is better than the newer, in vogue, system, but this might illustrate it best: the new system seems to be like trying to teach one how to write stories by focusing only on the alphabet. The result is strings of letters that don't mean much of anything.

The older "imitation" style of learning is in reality the way we learn everything. The most rudimentary abilities of human life--speech, walking, even eating--are learned by imitating our parents.

The reason, I think, that this style of learning has fallen out of favor in the arts at least--music, painting, and writing to name just three--is the modern value placed on novelty (or it's more respectable term originality.) Such is the esteem given originality in modern art (or at least the perception of originality) that almost all other attributes--beauty, structure, meaning-- are willingly sacrificed to its preeminence. Personally I still find beauty, structure and meaning important qualities in art, which is why I probably find so much modern music, painting and fiction repellent.

To whatever degree beauty, structure, meaning--and above all, truth--are significant to the quality of art, they are incalculably more so to the Christian life. Christians, as disciples of Christ, are trying to learn from Him the way to live. Disciple means pupil, from the Latin discipulus. The Greek word matheteuo, often translated as disciple, means learner.

Jesus is our teacher in life; as his pupils the best way to learn is to imitate. Anti-Christian critics have ridiculed this principle by such slogans on bumper-stickers as, "What would Jesus drive?" and, "Who would Jesus bomb?", but this doesn't invalidate the very real and important question that Christians have been asking themselves for two millenia: what would Jesus do?

And if this life is the preparation for where we will spend eternity and what we are to become, which I believe Scripture teaches us, then this quote from a recent sermon by the brilliant preacher and theological writer, Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho--(you can access a downloadable mp3 of this sermon, entitled, "A Second Battle of Tours II", by clicking here)--is particularly poignant:

"...we need to recognize that if you're worshiping an idol, you are going to become like the idol you worship. If you're worshiping the true God, you're going to become like the true God...Paul tells us very clearly that we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another as we behold the face of God in Christ. And John tells us that when we see Him we're going to become like Him because we're going to see Him as He is. The one we worship, when we see Him most clearly in the resurrection, we're going to be completely conformed to His image when we see that image most clearly. And as we see that image through a glass darkly, now, we are being transformed in a process from one degree of glory to another. And if you worship an idol, the same process happens. You become more and more like that idol: deaf, dumb, and blind."

What is truth?

"...For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world--to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" John 18:37,38 (ESV)

This exchange between Jesus and Pontius Pilate is evocative of the modern tortured soul searching for meaning and authenticity in a life awash in moral ambiguity and relativism. As I read this I am almost tempted to visualize Pilate as a beat poet, clothed in a black turtle-neck and beret, with a cigarette between his fingers as he wistfully asks his profound question, "what is truth, man?"

Perhaps the reason for my mental picture is the way Pilate's question seems so different in subject from Jesus' preceding statements that he had come to bear witness to the truth, and every one who was of the truth would listen to his voice--implying that truth was a qualifying characteristic of his message--whereas Pilate's question seems directed not at the nature of Jesus' message, but at the nature of the concept of truth itself.

This is why Pilate's question is so timely to our age; it goes to the very heart of a crucial dilema of Christianity and the Gospel message in the present. We are inheritors of a culture that has fragmented our concept of truth to, on one hand a solid compartment of "fact", in which we house science, and on the other hand an amorphous cloud, in which we relegate "values". Facts are reliable; they are Newtonian physics. Values are capricious matters of personal taste, arbitrary and changeable. In modern Western culture it has become bad manners to state one's morality with any degree of certainty.

Yet central to Christianity is a complete, undivided concept of truth. As Francis Schaeffer put it in his book The God Who is There:

Before a man is ready to become a Christian, he must have a proper understanding of truth, whether he has fully analyzed his concept of the truth or not... Some who consider themselves real Christians have been infiltrated by the twentieth-century thought-forms. In reference to conversion, in a Christian sense, truth must be first. The phrase 'accepting Christ as Saviour' can mean anything. We are not saying what we are trying to say, unless we make completely clear that we are talking about objective truth, when we say Christianity is true and therefore that 'accepting Christ as Saviour' is not just some form of 'upper-story leap'. (emphasis mine)


In other words, when we as Christians say God exists, we are not talking about god as an idea, but God as a person, for whom one can properly use the pronoun He. When we say Jesus died for our sins, we aren't talking about a myth that illustrates the comforting idea of forgiveness, redemption and second chances; we are declaring that the real and personal God who exists, took on the incarnate human form of a man, lived for 33 years, and was actually crucified in the real Roman province of Judea some 2,000 years ago; that His death was a substitute for our real moral guilt before God as a way to reconcile us back to a proper relationship with Him.

One of the most exceptional aspects of Christianity--by which I mean distinct from other religions--is how it is solidly rooted in space-time. The Gospels challenge every reader with references to real historical people, places and events in ways that can--and have--been examined and verified.

To Pilate's question Christianity says truth is: scientific fact, Newtonian physics and objective moral absolutes as defined by God's righteous nature, revealed to man through His word.

Skepticism or Scandal?

Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (Mark 8:15-18 ESV)

The default attitude of science is skepticism; a necessary posture, at least in the testing phase of the scientific method. However, with Western culture's deification of science, skepticism has become more than an essential ingredient to scientific inquiry; it has been elevated to a virtue. In the above text, we get a slightly different notion of God's attitude towards skepticism--at least with regard to our relationship to Him.

At this point in the narrative of Mark's gospel the disciples had witnessed numerous examples of Jesus' divine power, and yet they still failed to understand who he really was; indeed prior to this they had seen Jesus calm a vicious storm on the sea that had threatened to kill them all just by speaking to the wind and water and ...said to one another, "Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?" (Mark 4:41 ESV) A little later, after Jesus had fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, they had seen Jesus walking on water, while they struggled in their boat against a fierce head wind. When Jesus got into the boat with them and the wind instantly died down, ...they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. (Mark 6:51,2 ESV)

The disciple's inability to perceive Jesus' true identity, which from our vantage point millennia later as readers of the gospel, makes them seem almost comically dense, was not a result of honest skepticism--but then again neither is modern man's rejection of God. It was--and is--rather a result of man's fallen nature which hardens his heart and makes him resistant to submission to God. The same impulse behind Eve's seduction to sin, to "be like God" and determine her own rules of right and wrong rather than follow God's rules, still impels us today in what we so often misinterpret as skepticism, but what is in reality our intractable defiance of God. It is the same impulse that Milton wrote of as the words of Satan in Paradise Lost, "...better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." And it is the same impulse which governs the scandal of the cross that Francis Schaeffer described in his book, The God Who Is There. "The true scandal is that however faithfully and clearly one preaches the Gospel, at a certain point, the world, because it is in rebellion, will turn from it. Men turn away not because what is said makes no sense, but because they do not want to bow before the God who is there. This is the 'scandal of the cross'."

This hard-heartedness is what Jesus was speaking of as the "leaven of the Pharisees"; it was what blinded the disciples to Jesus' identity for so long, and why, when Jesus finally confronted them with the question, and Peter answered, ...you are the Christ, the son of the living God,, Jesus said, ...flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. (Matt.16:17 ESV) It is why Jesus said, ...no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. (John 6:44 ESV) This is why any evangelical or missionary endeavor, or even the sharing of one's personal testimony, must by necessity be a collaborative effort with the Holy Spirit. For this reason prayer is indispensable (and the failure to pray is perhaps one reason why the Church is not growing in this country as it has in the past). But if we do collaborate with the Holy Spirit in prayer and in declaring the gospel, we have God's promise: And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26-28 ESV)

Christ As King

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9:9 ESV)

Monarchs are something of an anachronism. Most of them still extant are nothing more than figure-heads who exercise no real political power but rather function as a national symbol of pride, harkening back to former glory days of empire, or embodying a sense of heritage and culture. Autocrats, regretfully, are in abundance in our world today, but rightfully in their very existence convey a basic quality of illegitimacy and despotism. Because of this, I think there's something lost in the translation of the concept of Christ as king that had much more immediate and pungent meaning to those of Jesus' time.

An essential sacred component of kingship in the ancient Hebrew world that carried over with Christianity to the European monarchies is that of anointing, the ritualistic pouring on of oil from a prophet or priest as a mark of consecration--the setting apart and dedication of one to God or the service of a sacred goal. The first instance of this was the anointing of Saul, the first king of Israel, by prophet/priest Samuel (I Samuel 10:1). But note that this only came about because the Israelites had rejected God as their king and demanded of Samuel that he "appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations," (I Samuel 8:5). Saul was, as such, authorized to rule as a substitute for God's direct rule. The anointing was the emblem of that authority and the testament that this authority emanated from God. Saul proved to be a disappointment to God, and so he was replaced by David, a man directly of God's choosing "after his own heart," (I Samuel 13:14), and it was to be through David's lineage that divine rule by proxy would continue. In this way the concept of "divine right" of rule (conferred by heredity) was originated, and later illegitimately appropriated by Christian monarchs. Though Gospel writers Mark and John forego the exercise, Matthew and Luke carefully chronicle Jesus' lineage to David, both to validate his candidacy for fulfillment of the Messianic prophesy and authenticate his right to kingship.

But in a surprising convergence of meaning, Jesus realized not only the personage of final king of the Davidic covenant--the culmination of that covenant as the prophesied Messiah (literally "the anointed")--and as such, the ultimate substitute of God's direct rule, but, as the incarnate Son of God, also re-established God's direct rule. The whole idea has come full circle, all in the person of Jesus.

There's a complication, though. The Hebrews conceived of this final Davidic king, as prophesied by Zechariah, Isaiah, and others, in purely materialistic terms: he would come, crush all Jewish enemies, and establish an Israelite empire in which peace and prosperity would exist through the ages. But God had a much more comprehensive agenda than merely instituting peace between nations, and eradicating false religions. The divine plan was to first deal with mankind's eternal existence, to reconcile man back to relationship with God. That relationship had been broken by man's fallen nature and God had to deal with man's sin first.

So, at the brink of Jesus' fulfillment of God's plan of reconciliation, he was brought before Pilate who asks him, "Are you the King of the Jews?", and Jesus gives this answer: "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world." (John 18:36 ESV) Then began the ritual of his spiritual enthronement. What a terrible sort of coronation it was: the flesh of his back shredded by flogging, a purple robe then draped over the open wounds, a reed for a scepter, a wreath of thorns pressed into his forehead for a hideous crown, and his court a battalion of Roman soldiers who mocked and reviled him; and finally his truly appalling throne, the instrument of his death by torture--the cross. Yet by this horrible spectacle he freed forever his subjects from the dominion of sin and death, and ushered them into his spiritual kingdom. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according the Spirit. (Romans 8:1-4 ESV)

Does this mean there will never be an earthly kingdom of God? No; as it says in I Corinthians 15:24-25, Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. (ESV) We've seen the awful vision of Jesus' spiritual kingship in crucifixion; juxtapose that with the picture of his earthly rule in Revelation 19:11-16: Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems,--(no more crown of thorns)--and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron.--(his reed scepter has been replaced with something more fearsome)--He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.

Moving Forward

My last post on this blog, "The Road Back", is to me one of the most important things I've ever written in my life. I sent out a lot of emails inviting friends and family to read it and comment, but it sort of stopped me in my tracks from writing anything else in this space. I want to keep this particular article easily accessible, since I feel so strongly about it, so I decided to create another blog just for it. I slightly altered the piece, making some additions at the end (including the posting on this blog), and have included the link to it on this and my political blog. I will also include a link to it in my email signature. I encourage comments on this and my other blogs. If you don't wish to register on Blogger, you can comment as anonymous, though, if you like you can include your name within the comment, and even your email address if you'd like to contact me. Or you can email directly: don@donmitchell.us (or just click the link "Email me" in the side bar)

Now, moving forward.

The Road Back

When the attack of 9/11 occurred I was still working as a forman in the shop of the steel fabrication business with which I am employed. I had a small fabrication project of my own, so I was listening to Mark and Brian on KGON while I worked, having come in at 5:30 that morning as we were on an overtime schedule. Mark and Brian made the announcement on their show after the first plane struck one of the twin towers. At first I thought it was a joke, one of their twisted little comedy routines, but when they announced that the second plane had struck I knew instantly that it was the work of terrorists. When they announced the third plane had struck the Pentagon I knew we were at war.

I turned the radio to a news station and listened as often as I could for the rest of the day. When I got home I stayed glued to the TV, switching back and forth from station to station, desperate to learn the slightest bit of new information, and over and over again I saw the video of the planes striking the buildings and then the towers collapsing. Over the days and weeks that followed I abandoned any interest in entertainment and from the moment I would get home from work until I went to bed at night I would either watch cable news (I quickly gave up on network stations) or poured over internet sites in a search to find out who had done this horrible thing, and why.

The weekend after the attack I was driving around town on errands when it dawned on me that all the flags were flying at half-mast. It was like a moment of epiphany. My father was a World War II naval veteran, but I, one of the "baby boomer" generation, had looked on the reverence with which my father's generation held the American flag with a kind of self-congratulatory aloofness, even disdain, as though they were acting somewhat childish. I had a more sophisticated and nuanced view of America and its place in the world that put me above such simplistic sentimentality. But now, seeing all those flags flying at half-staff, a symbol of so many of my fellow countrymen dead, my country attacked with no other goal than death and horror, with no other motive than to create that horror, my eyes filled with tears, and I at last understood. My world was shifting beneath me. But this was only the beginning.

Before I continue with my story it might be helpful if I recount some of my past and how I came to be so cynical, sardonic--and at the brink of apostasy.

My father was an evangelist and pastor, so I grew up around the ministry. A very early memory of mine, from perhaps four years of age, is lying prone on the platform of a revival tent, coloring in a coloring book, and periodically looking out at the audience as my father preached. Dad came from the deep South (born in Georgia and grew up in Florida), was steeped in the Bible-belt culture, and began traveling as a very young man with his older sister in the evangelistic field. Soon after I was born, he stopped traveling, and started the Full Gospel Baptist Church in Yuma, Arizona (my home town). But when I was 12 Dad gave the church over to someone else and went back out on the evangelistic field. My adolescence was spent traveling the country from small church to church, holding revival meetings. Under the umbrella of my father's ministry, I began to preach as well. When I was 16, during a very long revival meeting we had in the Medford, Oregon Church of God, I began preaching every weekday on live radio from the Christian station in Ashland.

I had just finish sixth grade when we began to travel. There was no home school movement at that time, so I finished my education through a correspondence course designed for adult high school drop-outs called American School out of Drexel, Illinois. Many people began to encourage me to prepare for Bible College and seminary, but my father actually discouraged me from this idea. I realize in our present cultural climate this seems unthinkable, but my father was born in 1916 in the deep South and was a product of his time and region. In his time and socio-economic class in the South formal education was suspect, and natural--or "God-given"--abilities valued.

I was from another time and region, though. As I entered young adulthood and tried to establish a ministry of my own, separate from my father's shadow of authority, I found my lack of Bible college credentials an insurmountable obstacle. My arrogance and argumentativeness didn't help matters. I began to bridle at what I considered the small-mindedness of other preachers who were my seniors, and grew increasingly frustrated at my lack of opportunity to preach. In my early twenties I was married with two children, working a dead-end job, and doing nothing in the ministry but playing the organ in a small Open Bible church in Newberg, Oregon.

At the same time I was struggling with my place in the church and my frustrations and failure to establish a ministry as an adult, I was working with men who were attending George Fox college, a Quaker college in Newberg, Oregon. A couple of these men, coming from a different theological heritage than the fundamentalism I grew up with, were challenging my interpretation of Scripture--and my faith, at least certain tenants that I had taken for granted. Yet one of the greatest challenges to my faith came not from other believers, but from my first intimate acquaintance with true atheists.

I had been interested in writing from an early age, and several years prior to my crisis of faith, I had started writing Science Fiction short stories (virtually the only paying short story market left in the United States), trying to break into the field as a published author. Through contacts I made in a community college fiction writing class I found out about a Science Fiction writer's workshop conducted by husband and wife writers Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm who lived in Eugene, Oregon. I submitted a story, was accepted, and for the next ten years attended their monthly workshop which they held in their home. They did this for many years for no charge, out of pure kindness and generosity. It's difficult for me to express what a profound cultural shock my relationship with Kate, Damon, and the other participants of the workshop was. Many aspects of my unusual childhood had matured me far beyond my age group, but only in certain regards; in others I had remained naive, sheltered as I was from certain types of people--such as atheist intellectuals and artists. It was cognitively dissonant, jarring to find these people, with whom I disagreed on so many of the most important issues of life--politically as well as philosophically (for they were extremely liberal politically)--so loving and kind and giving of themselves, so different from what I would have expected them to be; they were atheists!

Things finally came to a head several years later--the final straw, you might say--when the pastor of the Open Bible church I was attending, after having participated in one of Bill Gother's Basic Youth Conflicts seminars, announced that no one would have any leadership or ministry capacity in that church unless they went to and completed a Basic Youth Conflicts seminar course, I quit the church in a pique of anger. Basic Youth Conflicts had always impressed me as something of a commercial scam. Gother requested participants to keep the material secret from anyone who did not take the course directly from him (and therefore pay him) which gave it the odor of Gnosticism to me. I left the church that instant, only coming back once to get my Hammond organ and Leslie speaker. I never entered a church again for many years. Perhaps a year after I quit that Open Bible church I ran into a man whom I considered a friend from a different church I had attended a year or so prior, a church I had quit out of frustration when I was never allowed to preach or minister in any way other than music (and that not much). When he asked me where I was ministering, and I told him that I was no longer ministering or even attending church anywhere, he became sad, shook his head, and said he would pray for me. I remember becoming enraged at what I perceived as his condemnation. How dare he judge me for leaving the ministry when he and his church had never given me an opportunity, nor lifted a finger to help me? And the ultimate irony was I had found more acceptance, more help, more love from my atheistic teachers and friends than I had from those who were supposed to be my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I told myself at first that it was church that was the problem. They were all a bunch of small-minded hypocrites. They were charlatans, out for themselves, manipulative and petty. It was them I was mad at, not God. But little by little, as I isolated myself from other Christians, I began to question all my beliefs. Not with any sort of real intellectual honesty, of course; I just let it all go, quit reading the Bible, began to speculate that perhaps my upbringing and prior experiences were nothing more than the product of a "belief system". If I had been intellectually honest about my questions of faith I would have delved into it, studied, put it all to the test of genuine inquiry, but instead I tucked it all away and refused to think about it. It was easier to simply stew in my resentment of the church and finally forget about it all and focus on other things. I started out trying to punish the church for whatever real or imagined offenses they had inflicted on me, but I ended up excluding God from my life.

But this is not yet the worst of it. My greatest shame is that my falling away happened when my sons were mere toddlers, and as I abandoned first the church, and then God, I also abandoned their instruction in Christian faith.

The intervening years were devoted to my trade in the steel fabrication industry, and raising my sons. Oddly enough (and thank God!) my desertion of God didn't express itself in drug or alcohol abuse or any other number of self and marriage-destructive behaviors: I prospered at my trade; my marriage stayed intact (though I must give most of the credit for that to my wife); and I raised two fine sons of whom I am abundantly proud. My dreams of being a fiction writer eventually disintegrated. For sixteen years I studied the Korean martial art TaeKwondo, rose to the rank of 4th degree black belt, until a back injury at work ended that pursuit. But through it all I remained emotionally and culturally-or perhaps philosophically-isolated from my working and hobby acquaintances. I still believed in the existence of God and in the rightness of the Christian moral truth I had been raised with and this always seemed to distance me from my non-believing friends and co-workers. At the same time my disengagement from God distanced me from Christian friends and co-workers. I was, in many respects, a man without a country, a miserable state largely induced by my absurd attempt to cling to the moral truth of Christianity while ignoring and detaching myself from its source.

One of the results was a growing bitterness, a capitulation to the darker, sullen aspects of my nature. My language grew ever more foul and vulgar. I viewed the world through a smoky lens of pessimism and adopted the notion that the best way to endure this tragedy was to ridicule it. That was my state on 9/11: arrogant, misanthropic, and so suspicious of my own government that I was ready to quit voting.

* * * *

I inherited my mother's penchant for reading which has expressed itself in my desire to write, and also my almost obsessive habit of reading about any interest or activity I'm engaged in at any time in my life. My reaction to the 9/11 attack was no different; I began to read, first searching articles on the internet, then books from the library to help me understand the motivations of the jihadists. I read books on Muslim history by noted Middle Eastern scholar, Bernard Lewis, whom I discovered by watching C-Span II, which on the weekends is "Book TV", featuring interviews and lectures by non-fiction writers. This led me to read American history to better understand my own country and the origins of its culture. As I stated before, my immediate emotional response to the attack was an intense patriotism--something I think I shared with many Americans. But this also led to an investigation of conservative politics, as I was disgusted by the America-loathing and terrorist-excusing gist of so much that came from the popular media and especially the intelligentsia of the American political left. In my search for conservative political commentators on websites such as Nation Review Online and Townhall.com, I discovered writers who concerned themselves with the philosophical underpinnings of American conservatism such as Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, and Thomas Sowell, a writer of enormous influence to me, especially with his triology of books on political science, Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles,and The Quest for Cosmic Justice. In reading books such as these I began to see the influence of Judeo-Christian moral thought on the American system of law, and so began to search out texts that would more clearly explain this to me.

One such book was Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George's The Clash of Orthodoxies, Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis. In this important work he, "...demonstrates that the great conflicts of our day reflect not mere partisan disagreement, but a fundamental conflict in worldviews...and makes the case for the Christian intellectual tradition..." (as stated by Chuck Colson on the flyleaf). Here I was, for the first time, confronted with the idea of a Christian worldview, not the pejorative "belief system" I had come to see it as so many years ago. This was serious stuff. It demanded my attention.

On another weekend, while checking out Book TV on C-Span II, I saw a lecture by Nancy Pearcey concerning her book, Total Truth; Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. A couple of years prior to this I would have immediately turned the channel on seeing the title of the book, but now I was riveted by what she was saying. Like professor George, she was presenting Christianity as a worldview, a concept of moral truth that speaks with authority to every aspect of our lives and culture, not just the private and purely subjective realm of our "values". Despite her extremely calm demeanor and moderate appearance, I was so energized by her talk that I ordered the book. This book was a major turning point for me. It presented me not just with philosophical arguments for my political views, but with the challenge of God's transforming grace. This was no longer just philosophy; I was now confronted with real Christianity and my responsibility to the real and living God. What had started out as an examination of my country, its history and place in the world, and my political beliefs, had now transformed to a question of my relationship to God.

Upon reading her book I found out that she was a long-time student of Christian philosopher, historian, and theologian Francis Schaeffer, and that her book (and a previous one she did with Chuck Colson called How Now Shall We Live?) was a continuation of Schaeffer's work on the development of a Christian worldview. I sought out and read his seminal work, How Should We Then Live? in which he looks at the historical arc of Western civilization, starting with the fall of the Roman empire and following all the way to our modern age. It traces the beneficial influence of Christian moral thought on culture, philosophy, and law, and then the decline of the same as Western civilization incrementally rejected Christianity.

I pulled from my bookcase and reread a book I had first read in my early twenties, the book that was instrumental in Chuck Colson's conversion, C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. This too had a profound effect on me. Of particular power was Lewis' argument that what he called the Law of Human Nature (but in more modern parlance might be called the human innate sense of right and wrong) is a proof of the existence of God, in that it can't be explained naturally--or in evolutionary terms, if you will--because it is not a law that describes how things actually work, as does the law of gravity for instance, but how we humans believe things ought to work.

Another influence, oddly enough, were two observant jewish radio talk-show host whose programs I had come to listen to on a daily basis. The fact that I do computer-assisted drafting allows me to listen to talk radio as I work, and for two years I had been listening to Michael Medved and Dennis Prager on a Christian talk radio station. Both of these brilliant men deal with cultural, as well as political issues on their shows, and Dennis Prager--especially--deals with moral issues from an unapologetically Biblical reference. Listening to these men day after day, speaking with intellectual integrity and uncompromising faith in their Judaism, and giving honor and respect to their, admittedly, mostly Christian audience had its effect on me. This was a phenomenon that had spiritual implications I could not deny.

While these influences were roiling within me, my wife and I were occasionally attending my father-in-law's Lutheran church. The liturgical services were strange to me, coming as I do from a fundamentalist background, and the sermons seemed anemic compared to the fiery preaching I had grown up with, yet even this was having its effect on me--inducing a hunger for something more substantial, if nothing else. As in Francis Thompson's poem, the "Hound of Heaven" was pursuing me.

* * * *

A little over a year ago my wife and I visited my best friend from childhood, Steve Schmelzer, who is now the pastor of Christian Joy Fellowship in Medford, Oregon. In adolescence and young adulthood (before my falling away) we had been very close, but had lost touch for many years. During the few times we had visited things had seemed odd and a bit strained between us. Now, on this visit, things were different; not quite the way it had been in our youth, but the closeness was returning on many levels. I shared with him much of what I had read, and how my faith in Christ was returning. Yet I still lacked the fellowship of other believers. Though my faith in God was reviving, I was not worshiping God, I was not serving God. As Steve and I talked during that holiday weekend, I finally began to see that until I took that step, until I was ready to worship God, to serve God, and to confess before men that Jesus Christ was my Lord and savior, my faith was nothing more than a private sentiment with no real consequences, a self-soothing exercise of moral cowardice.

Finally, as all these influences began to coalesce, I received a mailing from a local church (Countryside Community Church) announcing a sermon series called "God, the director's cut." It sounded intriguing. I checked the service times, and the services looked to be timed in at just about an hour long; the church was close--I had little to lose. The atmosphere of the church was very casual, the music contemporary, but the sermon was coherent and Biblically-based. The same screen on which the worship song lyrics were projected was used to show short clips from films at intervals during the sermon to illustrate key points. This was innovative, yet effective. Later, when I visited Countryside's website to find out more about their core beliefs and any denominational affiliations they might have, I discovered that they had a system of small groups tailored to any number of categories, i.e., age group, couples, singles, men or women only, etc.. I located a men's only group and contacted the leader by email. Soon I was meeting with this small group on Friday mornings.

The first few times I attended Countryside by myself, but my wife was soon attending with me. We joined a couples group that met on Thursday nights, and soon after that a 10 week class on Monday nights called "Christianity Explored." Inexplicably, in a just a handful of weeks, we both had gone from thinking of church as something we really "ought" to do (as in, "I really ought to floss my teeth every day,") to something to which we looked forward, something we were excited about.

At an earlier point in this journey, when my mother-in-law was still alive, but in failing health, she had requested that all of her family accompany her to a Christmas service at Our Savior's Lutheran church in Lake Oswego, Oregon. It took quite a bit of cajoling on our part to get our sons to agree to join us. Afterward, as we were driving home my oldest son, Nigel, asked me what I saw in Christianity. When I think now about my answer I blush at its insipidness--something about "the whole picture", "Western Civilization" and "moral values". But of course the real answer is, because it's true! Because it answers all of the most profound questions of human existence; because it confirms the deepest longings of human nature: for final justice, for forgiveness, for things to finally be made right as we perpetually yearn for, even as we are certain that they are not now right, for the authentication of the eternal, the transcendent and the sacred. And, perhaps most profound of all is the experience of discipleship in Christ, the empirical knowledge of its reality in the confirmation--the "stamp of approval"--of the Holy Spirit:

...you have been adopted into the very family circle of God and you can say with a full heart, "Father, my Father." The Spirit himself endorses our inward conviction that we really are the children of God. Romans 8:15,16 (Phillips translation).

Looking back now, I can't pinpoint a specific time in which I re-committed my life to Christ. There was no emotional or spiritual moment of epiphany. But slowly, bit by bit, I began to trust in God again, to pray again, to worship again. As I began to read the Bible again on a daily basis the fire of its truth began to burn within me, reawakening a craving I had almost completely forgotten. It was a process, as I believe it will continue to be throughout the rest of my life, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians in his second letter to them:

And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him. 2 Corinthians 3:18 (Eugene Peterson's translation/paraphrase The Message).

A Hierarchy to Sin?

"...the subject of AIDS... brings out the best in the church, like you see today in response to these children suffering HIV...but if we're honest, it has also brought the worst out of the church. Judgmentalism, a kind of sense that people who have AIDS, well, they got it because they deserve it. Well, from my studies of the Scriptures, I don't see a hierarchy to sin. I don't see sexual immorality registering higher up on the list than institutional greed (or greed of any kind, actually), problems we suffer from in the West."
Rock star Bono to pastors, parents, and children gathered at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport a few weeks before Christmas as part of an airlift of 80,000 gift boxes to HIV-infected children in Africa, organized by Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child.

I came across this quote when I was reading a 2003 article from Christianity Today about Bono's expression of Christian faith. Perhaps I'm the last to know, and maybe this betrays my own biases, but the idea that Bono is a Christian was dumbfounding to me. Nevertheless, I have no intention of criticizing Bono's Christianity. I do plan on criticizing his theology, though.

From a purely secular and purely rational standpoint it should be clear to all that everyone's innate sense of right and wrong has a system of proportionality built into it; the very word value , which we use for guiding principle, has as its first meaning a degree of worth or how much something costs. And so our criminal system is categorized by degrees, the two main categories being misdemeanor and felony. Even within those larger categories, crimes are designated by degree (i.e., first degree murder & second degree murder) to denote the range of culpability, mitigating circumstance (was it provoked, premeditated or a crime of passion, etc.,) and therefore the severity of punishment to be meted out by the state.  This innate sense of degree and proportionality built into our sense of good and evil is so obvious and rich with example it would be hard to argue against the idea that it is merely reflecting God’s moral principles, but there are cases in which God’s word, especially the words of Jesus, teach us to go against, if not our sense of right and wrong, at least our sense of fairness such as turning the other cheek when struck by an enemy.  So we are presented with the question of what the Bible has to say about a hierarchy of sin.

Let me start by pointing out the clear hierarchy of God’s commandments.  Consider this passage from Matthew 22:35-40 (Eugene Peterson’s The Message)  
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:  "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
 
So we have it from no less than Jesus himself that there is a hierarchy to the commandments.  It follows, therefore, that if there is a hierarchy to the commandments—God’s moral law—there must also be a hierarchy associated to breaking those commandsments—sin. And that's stated plainly here:

For instance, if we see a Christian believer sinning (clearly I'm not talking about those who make a practice of sin in a way that is "fatal," leading to eternal death), we ask for God's help and he gladly gives it, gives life to the sinner whose sin is not fatal. There is such a thing as a fatal sin, and I'm not urging you to pray about that. Everything we do wrong is sin, but not all sin is fatal. (I John 5:16,17 The Message)

John doesn't tell us precisely what this fatal sin is, but he does clearly establish the Biblical principle of gradation to sin. I propose that since Jesus has authenticated that the most important commandment is to love and worship God, then the greatest sin we can commit is to fail to love and worship God. And this is why none of us can stand before God with our own righteousness, why it was necessary for Jesus to pay the price for our sin and justify us in the eyes of God--because every man, woman and child of us has committed that worst of sins.

Indispensable Guilt

Perhaps you're familiar with the movie, Seven? It was a very dark, even outre' film, yet powerful in its emotional impact, and, I think, in the implications of its themes to modern society. In it, a mysterious serial killer is "preaching" (as Morgan Freeman, playing an older detective investigating the case, calls it) by committing a succession of grisly murders, each with the theme of one of the seven deadly sins. When Freeman's character, on the verge of retirement, finally recognizes the pattern, he researches the sins and informs his superior and the young detective he is training to take his place (Brad Pitt) that the seven deadly sins were a common topic of medieval sermons, but have long since fallen out of style. Such is the skill of the writer, director and actors that as we watch the gruesome case take its course, we find ourselves almost sympathetic to the murderer as the sordid objects of his cruelty get their comeuppance--especially the lawyer and the child-molester. In this way the film engages in some interesting, and perhaps even useful, social commentary. But in the end we are convinced that the murderer is driven mad as much by his religious impulses as by his abhorrence of the depravity of contemporary society.

The overarching message of the film--that moral outrage at sin, or guilt for one's own sin--is a mental disorder, has been a recurring theme from popular media, entertainment...and the professional mental health community in western civilization now for many decades. This is not a new idea, however. We first encounter its most primitive form in the story of the fall. The serpent's statement to Eve concerning God's prohibition of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and his warning of fatal consequences was, "You won't die. God knows that the moment you eat from that tree, you'll see what's really going on. You'll be just like God, knowing everything, ranging all the way from good to evil." (Genesis 3: 4,5 Eugene Peterson's translation, The Message) In other words, "it's all a trick; God's just 'having one over' on you. No need to feel bad about it. We're all adults here." Sound familiar? Maybe something like, "guilt is just (insert authority figure of choice here, i.e. parents, society, organized religion, etc.)'s way of controlling you,"?

This concept has been inculcated with extraordinary success in modern western culture. Over and over, from thousands of different sources, sometimes overtly, often times subtly, we are instructed that much of what the Bible calls sin is just another socially valid variety of human behavior, and that any feelings of guilt that may arise from that behavior is pathology, a form of mental disfunction that we should purge from our thoughts to be truly healthy and well-balanced. In its most advanced stages, this vision of progressive orthodoxy expresses itself in a kind of moral inversion such that any public endorsement of Biblical behavioral prohibitions is itself condemned as sin--the sin of intolerance, bigotry and hatred. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with regard to sexual behavior. Western culture has come to esteem sexual indulgence of almost every kind to the point where it is celebrated as a virtue. The Marvin Gay song Sexual Healing comes to mind.

All of this begs the question: what is sin? The dictionary definition of, "a transgression of religious or moral law" (American Heritage) seems a bit thin, although I think by looking to the Ten Commandments we can get a clue as to its most essential meaning, specifically the very first of the ten. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before (or besides) me." (Exodus 20: 2,3 ESV) And here's the crux of the matter. This very first law of God holds the key to all we must call sin. It's man's rebellion against God's right of sovereignty and the self-evident obligation to worship God that is (1) the greatest sin, and (2) the source of all other sin. This first and most deadly sin is the one that condemns us all; at the moment of our birth, innocent of all other things, with our first breath we cry out in a petulant scream of worship to ourselves as the center of the universe, a recapitulation of Eve's first sin. Eating the forbidden fruit? No, aspiring to break the obligation of worship and submission to God, to be, in effect, equal with God. Remember the serpent's words of seduction: "...the moment you eat of that tree...you'll be just like God." No need to worship your equal.

So, where does that leave us with regard to this modern secular view of guilt as pathology? If we take as a given that human existence is a spiritual battle to determine our eternal destiny (which I do because it's scriptural--see Ephesians 6:10-13); and that Christ's incarnation and death on the cross was the divine redemptive act to pay for our sin and re-establish our relationship with God; and that the spiritual forces of evil at work in this world want to keep us from accepting God's redemption--then it naturally follows that this widely disseminated view is an effective weapon in the arsenal of those forces working to keep us separated from God.

Look at it this way for a moment: sin is man's biggest problem. The smallest granule of human misery in this life is directly attributable to sin, and dooms man to eternal separation from God. Now God solved the sin problem through Jesus's incarnation and sacrificial death, but the one prerequisite to "cashing in" on that redemption is man must repent of his sin and accept the Lordship of Christ (I know that sounds like two prerequisites, but it's actually a package deal). Yet for man to repent of his sin, he must first be convinced of it. That's the role of the gospel (preaching) and the work of Holy Spirit. "God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb--preaching, of all things!--to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation." (I Cor. 1:21 The Message), and, "...you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say 'Jesus be damned!' Nor would anyone be inclined to say 'Jesus is Master!' without the insight of the Holy Spirit." (I Cor. 12:3 The Message) So, if our spiritual adversary (that's the literal meaning of the word satan, by the way--"the adversary") wishes to keep us from redemption, one of his most potent tools is to persuade us that we don't need it, that sin is not a problem for us because there either is no such thing, or if there is, it's not anything that we have done.

"I've never killed anyone! I've never raped anyone! I'm basically a good person. And besides, if there is a God, he's a God of love, right? He wouldn't send me to hell. There probably is no hell anyway. That's just an archaic tribal superstition." With these and similar internal monologues the member of a modern western society can silence the voice of his conscience as the Holy Spirit tries to convince him of his sin.

"They live blindfold in a world of illusion, and are cut off from the life of God through ignorance and insensitiveness. They have stifled their consciences and then surrendered themselves to sensuality, practicing any form of impurity which lust can suggest." (Ephesians 4:18,19 Phillips translation) Muzzle the conscience for long enough, and it will go mute permanently. Guilt is more than useful, it's indispensable.

Danse Macabre

One of the great tragedies for people living out of relationship with God is that so many of them think they are living a decent moral life, yet are in reality living a life of empty pretense. Paul confronted this situation in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15 verse 19: "If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." and again in verse 32: "What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'" (ESV)

The central theme here, of course, is that there is an eternal dimension to our existence, and that our relationship with God, purchased for us by Christ's redemptive sacrifice, will not just be for the duration of our physical bodies. If this were the case, Paul says, if our relationship with God only lasted for the duration of this physical life and "...all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot." (I Cor. 15:19 in Eugene Peterson's translation The Message). Paul's quotation of Isaiah 22:13 in verse 32 "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," must have resonated with his Greek readers, because it seems to sum up the philosophy of the Epicureans who held that pleasure was the ultimate good and so devoted themselves to hedonism as an expression of that good. Paul seems to say, if there is no eternal dimension to our existence, no resurrection, no hope of eternal relationship with God, forget about Christianity and its moral constraints, forget about any greater meaning that your life might have because it doesn't have any meaning; live for the moment, become a hedonist and indulge yourself!

It's true enough that there are many people today who are doing just that, but I submit that most people are doing something different. They are playing a game, trying to pretend that their lives do have meaning and moral decency, while, in the ultimate tragic irony, they deny the very source of that meaning and are cut off the basis of all moral truth--which is, of course, God.

There's a good reason so many play this game. It takes some doing to completely abandon meaning and morality; man was created by God to desire meaning and morality, to seek God, to be in relationship with God. In times past we've called this the conscience. C.S. Lewis wrote extensively about it in Mere Christianity calling it the law of human nature, that innate sense of right and wrong that nobody seems to be able to live up to. The Apostle Paul spoke of this in his lecture to the Athenians, "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him..." (Acts 17:26-27 ESV), and again in his letter to the Romans, "When the gentiles, who have no knowledge of the Law, act in accordance with it by the light of nature, they show that they have a law in themselves, for they demonstrate the effect of a law operating in their own hearts. Their own consciences endorse the existence of such a law, for there is something which condemns or excuses their actions," (Romans 2:14-15 Phillips translation).

And this is the dilemma most of humanity finds itself in: people want to think of themselves as fundamentally good, they want to think that their lives have meaning; yet due to the fallen nature of humanity, they do not want to submit themselves to Christ's lordship. Many even deny the existence of God while paradoxically validating at least some of the moral code which only derives its authority from God.

If John Lennon's song Imagine is to be taken seriously, there are apparently some who yearn for a meaningless, moral-free life--"Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today ..." --but for the most part I believe this is adolescent self-pity expressing itself in a misguided attempt to be profound. Most people are trapped in the vacuous charade of pretending that their lives are connected to some greater meaning and moral value even as they disavow the origin of their existence, the source of its meaning and the authority of all moral truth, a self-delusional danse macabre that will result in their own eternal separation from God.