There’s no accounting for taste. Or to put it another way, the taste has reasons that reason knows not of. We like what we like, and we don’t like having to explain it. Which is why postmodernism fits us so well. Here it’s not just flavors of ice cream, but all of goodness, truth and beauty that gets reduced down to a matter of taste. And no one has to defend their tastes, for we can all be right. What makes less sense, however, is why, if there are indeed no standards, our tastes tend to follow patterns. If taste is simply random, then it seems there ought to be as many folks who prefer the sound of fingernails on chalkboards (sorry for those of you who get the sensation at the mere mention of the act) as there are folks who prefer the Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Check out the sales figures on I-tunes- it just isn’t so. One would think that the Uniform Commercial Code would sell as many copies as Tolkien. But it doesn’t happen.
We aren’t the products of chance, else our choice in products would come out like chance. Instead we are what we are, and what we are is rebels. That we prefer Pachelbel to fingernails is a reflection of our Maker, evidence that we are, even in our rebellion, made in His image. That we don’t much care for the Pentateuch shows that though we bear His image, we are in rebellion against Him.
Since Peter Jackson got ahold of them all the world has gone gaga over The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Tolkien has given us another land, a land filled both with bucolic villages, and with epic battles, with fidelity and with treachery, maidens and a mysterious hero who is heir to the throne. It stirs the hearts not only of children, but of men.
Which is why it is so puzzling that we, both within and without the church, are more enamored with the four books of Tolkien than the five books of Moses. What does Tolkien have that Moses has not? Here we find not a bucolic village, but better still, an edenic garden. Here we find betrayal on an immeasurable scale, and fidelity to the infinite degree. Here we have wicked tyrants who are brought down low, slavery and freedom, miracles and talking beasts and bushes, dragons and damsels, and in the shadows, the promise of an heir.
The difference in our taste then isn’t in what Moses left out that Tolkien put in. Instead it is found in what Moses put in, and Tolkien left out. We turn up our noses at the Pentateuch not because of the adventure therein, but the law. It isn’t the parts that read like titanic battles, but the parts that read like the Uniform Commercial Code. The problem with the Pentateuch to our postmodern ears isn’t the story, but the law. Tolkien, to be sure, gave us characters who were driven by law, enemies that acted lawlessly. But for all his attention to detail in creating his “alternate universe,” for all the language, music and aracania, there is no law.
Moses, on the other hand, not only gives us the great commandment, but he opens it up for us, twice, giving us the ten commandments both in Exodus and Deuteronomy. But just as the sin stones fill out the meaning of the great commandment, so does the rest of the law fill out the ten. We are told by Moses exactly how many sheep must be returned for one stolen sheep, for proper restitution, and how many goats must be returned in like manner when a goat is stolen. We are told what to do with a bull that gores a man, and what to do with a bull that has simply wandered off the farm. We are given instructions on how to sacrifice a bull, and how to build the grate on which he will burn. And no one could be interested in that.
Except David, a man after God’s own heart. “Oh how I love your law” David cries, “It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97.) Psalm 119 in fact is the longest chapter in all the Bible, and is nothing more than an extended poem praising the law of God.
There is not only a connection between this psalm and the Pentateuch, but a connection between our love of story, and David’s love of law. The glory of the story isn’t found in the high drama, but in the high Dramatist. The glory of the story is the glory of the Father. The great purpose of the Pentateuch is that we would more clearly behold the glory of God. What we have missed is that the same is true of His law. Yes the law shows us our need for Christ. Yes it restrains the heathen. And yes it shows us how to please our Father. But we long to please our Father because of His glory, and the law shows us that glory. It is lovely for precisely the same reason that Pachelbel’s Canon is lovely, because it shows forth the glory of God.
Such is the purpose of all that is true, all that is good, and all that is beautiful. It all exists to show us God. May we by His grace, and for His glory, learn to see His grace in revealing His glory, in giving us His law.
Time was when the answer to that question would be grounded in a faulty eschatology. Dispensationalism for decades taught a diminished understanding of the great commission. They saw it strictly as evangelism, that our calling was to drag as many people on to the lifeboat as we could before everything sinks to the bottom of the sea. Strangely, over the past forty years we’ve seen great swaths of dispensational people and institutions taking an interest in matters of culture, of government. Suddenly my friends seemed to wake up to our calling to not just evangelize but to disciple the nations, teaching them to obey whatsoever Jesus commanded.
Dispensationalism has essentially discarded its fundamentalist roots and joined the broader ranks of evangelicalism. That’s good news and bad news. The good news is now, as noted above, they are interested in the here and now, as they should be. The bad news, however, is that they have lost the great strength of fundamentalism, a gaping yawn of indifference to our standing in the broader culture. Forty years ago they didn’t care about the world, which is bad, and didn’t care what the world thought of them, which is good. Now they care about the world, which is good, and care what the world thinks of them, which is bad.
This failure of indifference is critical because it gives the world the only thing they have to hang over our head. It leaves them with the one weapon we most fear- rejection, loss of reputation. When we enter into a discussion about the raging sexual confusion in the broader culture our opponents throw insults instead of arguments. And we, because we are so hurt by the insults, flee for our lives. Anything, including absolute cultural capitulation is better than being thought of as a rube, a hayseed, a knuckle dragging evolutionary dead-end. If we don’t roll over, they taunt us a second time.
Jesus, the Bible tells us, hungered and thirsted for righteousness. His meat and His drink was to do the will of His Father. He left behind every bit of His visible majesty, His manifest glory, that He might not just change, but utterly remake the world. His opponents hated Him. They spat on Him. They conspired against Him, lied about Him, had Him beaten and put to death, surrounded by thieves and mockery. None of this phased Him. It was the pouring out of the wrath of the Father that led Jesus to cry out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Now He is victorious. Now He reigns over heaven and earth. Every power and every dominion is under His absolute rule. Now He is worshipped and adored by billions. All because He was willing to be hated. He wins because He fears God and no man. We lose because we fear man and not God. We will not see victory until we see that He has already overcome the world. We will not spare our reputations until we recognize they’ve already been lost. We will not live in the new world until we grasp that we have already died. We will not storm the gates of hell until we learn their weapon against is powerless, for He has already told us we are His children.
Thesis 11– We must practice hospitality.
It is my habit, when I grow unduly discouraged with the church, to read through I Corinthians. Reading through the long list of serious problems that Paul had to address there, and suddenly the contemporary church shines by comparison. There is drunkenness at the Lord’s Table, bitter divisions, theological squabbling and gross sexual immorality. Paul addresses that sexual immorality by suggesting that what is going on inside the Corinthian church is worse that anything the heathen would accept. Then he takes a parenthetical aside on the Christian’s response to the sexual practices of those outside the kingdom, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler” (I Corinthians 5:9-11). As shocking as Paul’s wisdom is here, it gets even more shocking. How, we might wonder, ought we to treat those who practice these sins, if they name the name of Christ? We are not to even eat with such a one, Paul tells us. Should they be shunned? Should they be stoned? Should they be turned over to the state? No. We should not eat with them.
As if this were not enough to show us of the importance of hospitality, it shows up again from the pen of Paul, in another unexpected place. He tells us that, as we might expect, elders in the church should be sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, not a drunkard, not a lover of money. But Paul also tells us that an elder should be hospitable. This ought not to surprise us because the concept of table fellowship is central to the Christian faith. When we come to the Lord’s Table we are receiving God’s assurance that we are at peace with Him. When we welcome others to our own tables, we are communicating much the same thing.
“Community” is one of those buzzwords that we know is critically important, but that is not only hard to define, but hard to find. People want to know what the secret is. The secret is that the secret is not a secret. The people of God are knit together in love at the table, both the table of the Lord, and the tables in their homes.
We have lost the blessings of hospitality because we’re too busy pursuing the good life. We rush from one activity to another, gulping down our meals. We wave to our pew neighbor at church as we race out the door to get to our tee time. We try desperately to fill the emptiness of our lives, making faux friends over the internet, or sharing nothing more meaningful than a favorite football team. The good life is sharing the blessings of God with those whom we love. Hospitality, of course, is far broader than sharing a meal. But it is not less than this. Perhaps we should start with some baby steps. Stop reading, and go invite someone to dinner. They may think you’re weird, which is your first clue that you’re on the right track.
Yes, and no. First to the no. Theologians, who like to make distinctions, distinguish between God’s communicable attributes and His incommunicable attributes. The former are those which He can and does share with us, though of course in lesser degrees. God, for instance, knows things and we know things. He, however, knows all things and knows them exhaustively and we do not. The latter refer to those qualities that are His alone. God, for instance, is immutable, while we are not. He cannot change, and we do in fact change. If ever there were an incommunicable attribute, however, it would be this- God is self-existent and eternal. We assuredly are not. God alone is self-existent and eternal, and all other things are dependent upon Him. Are we then creators in this sense? Of course not. I’m confident as well that your pastor would agree.
We are, however, God’s vice-regents, the stewards of His creation. And in calling us to exercise dominion over the creation, to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, He is calling us to reflect His glory, to be images of what He has done in the creation. As we bring all things under subjection, by His power and for His glory, as we the church act as a helper to our husband, the Second Adam in His call to bring all things under subjection, we enter into His work with Him. In this sense it would be fitting to say that we are “co-creators with God.” I suspect that your pastor had something like this in mind.
That said, there are at least two different groups that are terribly confused on this issue. Prosperity preachers have been known to teach what has come to be known as the “little-gods” doctrine. These folks, many of whom glut our airwaves, suggest that just as dogs have puppies and cats have kittens, so God begets little gods. This ancient heresy is explained and answered well in a fine book titled The Agony of Deceit, edited by my friend Dr. Michael Horton.
The second group is the eastern Orthodox church with its doctrine of theosis. Here salvation is less about our being declared just by the finished work of Christ on our behalf, and being adopted into God’s family, and more about how God’s grace is poured into us, making us partake more fully in the divine nature. You can read more about theosis in any dictionary of theology.
It is important for us to keep always before us, not just touching on creation, both the similarities and differences between us and God. The classic doctrine of our being made in the imago dei gets it right. We affirm the imputed dignity of man when we remember that we are made in the image of God. We escape the temptation of the Serpent when we remember that we are made in the image of God. We are neither cosmic accidents, nor gods. We are men, made in His likeness, for His glory. I trust, once again, that your pastor understands this as well. Always listen as a Berean, but always listen with a judgment of charity.
