What more can He say than to you He hath said? Every bit of fear, discontent, frustration that dwells in my spirit finds a place there because of my stubborn refusal to believe God. There is not another promise that He could ever make that would finally deliver me to satisfaction. For He has already promised me everything. I have been given life by Him. I have been given new life by Him. I have been adopted by Him. I have been promised life forevermore. I have been made a co-heir with the Heir of all things. I have the Pearl of Great Price. I have been assured that one day I will see Him and I will be like Him. I have been reminded that every step between now and the fulfillment of all promises is for my good.
Like the rich young ruler, however, I still lack one thing. I lack eyes to see all that I have been promised and a heart to trust that every one of His promises are yea and amen. I don’t need my Father in heaven to promise me more. I need Him to give me greater sight to see all that He has already promised me.
Consider the snow. God was pleased to open the windows of heaven and pour out on us an abundance of hand-made, unique ice sculptures. He has been pleased over the past week or so to protect those sculptures with cool temps. On top of that He has given us clear skies and a brilliant sun. Out of which He has given us a display of sparkling diamonds everywhere we look. By His grace I am grateful for His grace. Some, however, can’t seem to see it. In much the same way that others see His grace in a hot summer day, and I miss it completely. The problem isn’t the hardships of snow and cold, or heat and humidity. The problem is the hardness of our hearts.
CS Lewis, in The Last Battle, presents us with a scene wherein the stubborn and cynical dwarves are unable to see that they have entered into paradise. They insist they are stuck in a dark and pungent stable, that the feast being offered to them was created by the digestive system of a horse. Our temptation is to tsk-tsk the dwarves. Or, if we are willing to draw the lesson a little closer to home we feel sad for the unbelievers who can’t see God’s grace all around them. It is also, however, an us problem. We are ungrateful recipients of the daily abundance of His grace, thinking like those fool dwarves, that we haven’t been given much and that we deserve more.
I don’t have a solution, save for the same solution I’ve been given to every other problem. I need to repent and believe the gospel. I need to repent of my ingratitude, my lack of faith, the dullness of my sight. I need to believe that He has loved me from the foundation of the world, that He has numbered my days for my good and His glory and that He walks every step of the way with me to eternal paradise. He’s a good, good Father.
Gracious skepticism. Our response ought to begin with grace. Pastor Piper has, from all appearances, a credible profession of faith. We have every reason to believe that he is an honest and sincere Christian man. As such, even if we end up disagreeing with his claims, we need not do so snidely. That said, I think we ought to be skeptical not only of this story, but others like it. (Brother Piper was in a car accident, and believed to be dead. Ninety minutes later he was revived. He believes that in that interim he was in heaven. The book itself, however, spends precious little time describing his experience from heaven.)
The reason we are called to skepticism about such stories is found in the gospel of Luke, chapter 16, the story of Dives and Lazarus. You remember Jesus’ story here. A man who had been rich in this life, but was suffering the agonies of the flames of Hades. He cried out to Abraham, asking that Lazarus, who reposed in Abraham’s bosom, might be sent with a drop of water. When that was refused, he asked Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers, to warn them of the reality of suffering in Hades. He believed such an astonishing event, having Lazarus come from beyond the grave, might lead the brothers to repentance. But Abraham said, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead” (verse 31). I have not read Brother Piper’s book, and do not know how much apologetic weight he seeks to put on his experience (I have read that his goals include helping others with assurance, so it appears it is some weight) but others like him have had exactly that goal.
About twenty years ago I received an appeal letter from what I believe is the largest para-church ministry in the world. They were seeking to raise funds to make it possible for thousands if not millions across the globe to be able to watch a movie about the life of Jesus. The appeal was built around the story of a little girl who had had a near death experience, and claimed that God had given her just a few weeks of life to spread the word about Jesus. How easy it is for us to forget the actual teaching of God’s Word in our laudable desire to see others come under conviction of God’s Word. But God’s Word tells us that sinners come to faith by the power of the Holy Spirit through the power of the Word. Not through movies, books, or near death experiences. Neither does it happen through movies or books about near death experiences.
Brother Piper, though need not be a charlatan. He could simply be mistaken. My concern, however, is more with the kinds of mistakes people like me tend to make. First, Reformed Christians are the most cynical bunch in the kingdom. If evangelicals are excited about something, we’re quickly there as the wet blanket brigade. Now often evangelicals need a wet blanket. But we Reformed folk ought not to so enjoy tossing them about. Second, we Reformed suffer badly from a deep and abiding antipathy to all things supernatural. We are, as I have complained, practical deists. We believe God wrote His story, and never intervenes in space and time. I believe He can, and that He does. When a brother has a story to tell about God acting in his life, I pray my response will be first, “Praise God!” before it is, “Prove it.”
My incessant gasps were potent portents to my comparative illiteracy. I can’t contain them given the passion I feel for both wisdom and literary dexterity. The setting was my office as I work on a classical education curriculum project. We have covered Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. We considered Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as well as The Federalist Papers. But now comes the master of the written word, G.K. Chesterton and his master work, Orthodoxy.
It was my habit in working on this project to sometimes dog-ear and sometimes underline key passages I want future students to discuss. With GK Chesterton in general and Orthodoxy in particular there is no point in marking the book up. Opening the book to any page is like opening an oven filled with baking bread. You are stunned by the heat, delighted by the aroma. Which is why I find myself simply reading this passage and that, all while giggling like a schoolgirl, laughing at the glory.
If you are familiar with the book, you know of what I speak. If you are unfamiliar with the book, well, that is something we shall have to remedy. Chesterton writes in a genre all his own, the personal apologetic. He highlights his own journey into embracing “mere” Christianity, framing it as a sailor who journeys to the ends of the earth, only to “discover” that he had never left home. Chesterton, in a manner vastly superior to cold-hearted impossibility-of-the-contrary worldview jockeys, demonstrates that Christianity is not only true, but native to us. It is less that the Christian faith fits the God shaped hole in our souls, more that Christianity makes us fill the us-sized hole in the universe.
Though Orthodoxy is sometimes published as a companion piece to Heretics, Chesterton’s slicing up the modernist worldview like an As Seen on TV kitchen appliance, and was in fact written on purpose as a companion piece, Orthodoxy does still from time to time go on the offensive. In the chapter The Ethics of Elfland, Chesterton performs a veritable apologetical symphony, showing the modernist world for a rickety machine, while at the same time opening our eyes to wonder. It is daunting, dizzying, delightful.
Reading Chesterton is no easy thing. It is, as I like to describe it, like eating a buffet of desserts. Every taste is so rich that you both want more, and can take only so much. He is to be savored. In the end you end up with a fat soul, prosperous and joyful. Orthodoxy is a life-changing, even a life giving book, not because it will change your view on this thing or that, not because it will persuade you of your error in thinking this other thing. Instead reading Orthodoxy is like riding a cyclone, crushing the enemy, and then walking out, for the first time, into a world of color. Get it, read it. Then thank God, and send me a note too.
Safe from what? Those who would take their lives and plunder their goods? Yes. That is precisely the function of government. God has granted the state the power of the sword to punish those who assault life and property by force or fraud. It is not, however, the responsibility of the state to keep people safe from themselves. That is the responsibility of the individual. Once we embrace the seemingly benevolent notion that the state has the responsibility to protect us from ourselves we have opened the door to the worst possible tyranny. Any state that can keep a person from harming themselves has total control over that person.
It is missing the tyranny that invites the tyranny. We have grown accustomed to it. In New York City the mayor some years back tried to make it illegal to sell soft drinks in sizes larger than 16 ounces. Prohibition, of large sodas. Happily, the courts protected the citizens of New York from such overreach. That such legislation passed, however, should concern us. More recently we learned that the Biden administration has allocated $30,000,000 to programs that make smoking crack “safer.” There are three things we must not lose sight of.
First, there has been virtually utter silence from the public over this. I’d seen allusions to it on my twitter feed, but had to look it up to be sure it wasn’t clickbait. What I found is that the story is too blasé to be clickbait. No one cares. There is no sense of shame from those allocating these funds, nor is there outrage from those who might normally be opposed. In short, we’ve already embraced the tyranny.
Second, this program isn’t about helping people from accidentally and unknowingly harming themselves. It’s about helping people to harm themselves by keeping them from harming themselves worse. The whole point of the program is to reduce unintentional overdoses and infections. It reminds me of the insane reasoning that says abortion must be legal lest people get hurt in back-alley abortions. We wouldn’t want people killing their own children to be hurt would we?
Third, we have lost all sense of the numbers. $30,000,000? That’s a drop in the bucket. Only, however, if the bucket is the size of an ocean. Were you an average American wage earner and if you paid a tax rate of 50%, half of every dollar you earned, it would take you more 30 years just to pay for this one program for one year. Not a dime to national defense. Not a penny to fund the judicial system. More than half your working life to pay for one year’s worth of crack smoking safety aids. A grateful nation applauds you.
It was President Ford who said “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything you have.” How much more so a government that thinks it is called to give everyone what it thinks they need?
Today’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast
