What Love is This?

Posted on October 3, 2020 by RC

The simplicity of God is a doctrine that provides a rather useful fence. The perfections of God are, of course, worthy of our excitement. Their infinity is, of course, staggering. But the simplicity of God is that place where these infinite perfections show themselves to be one, where the glorious colors come together in a blinding white. Whatever else we delightfully affirm about God, we must affirm that He is one.

It is the very point of the doctrine of simplicity, however, that we don’t diminish one attribute when we remember another. We have misunderstood simplicity if, as we wax rhapsodic over the love of God, we throw a wet blanket over the party by remembering, “Well, He is also a God of wrath, after all.” The wrath of God doesn’t restrain the love of God, nor does the love of God restrain His wrath. Rather, in a profound way, they are one and the same thing.

There are some fairly obvious ways that we see this. In Psalm 2 we see the wrath of God coming for a specific reason, because the kings of the earth will not kiss the Son. The love of the Son is what provokes the wrath of the Father. We see much the same thing on the road to Damascus, as Jesus accuses Saul, “Why dost thou persecute Me?” Christ’s loving union with the Bride brings wrath on Saul. And in turn, that wrath brings forth love as Saul becomes Paul, a part of the bride.

Love is universally loved. We who belong to the King rightly celebrate His love for us. But those outside the camp do not stay outside the camp because of a self-conscious rejection of love. Those who think the lost are lost because they have trouble accepting love have been accepting too many foolish bromides from pop psychologists. The very creatures that the lost create, in their rejection of the Creator, are characterized by love. One can safely finish the idolater’s sentence, when he begins, “Well, my god is a god of…” It’s love, every time. Have you ever heard someone object, when we tell them to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus, “Well, I’m repulsed by your God that forgives the repentant. My god is a god of raging, irrational fury.” No. Everyone loves love.

But while love is not diminished by wrath, a love that excludes wrath is not a biblical love. The love clamored for by the lost is a wrathless love. But the love they crave is just unknown. While there is, rightly understood, a universal love of God that includes even those who will be damned, this love is a simple love, one that includes all that God is. There is no wrathless love that comes from God.

The Bible tells us that God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. We find there what some theologians call “common grace.” God acts kindly to all men living. We all need to remember this. When we, or others, in trying to describe their particular anguish describe their situation as “a living hell,” they do not understand the patient love of God. Any suffering experienced on this earth, save for the passion of Christ, is a suffering mitigated by His love, a suffering that is less severe than what is due, a suffering less severe than hell. But even the most wicked among us do not live their earthly lives exclusively in agony. Some unbelieving mothers genuinely rejoice when blessed with a child. Sometimes unbelievers win the Super Bowl, and are genuinely happy about it. Even the heathen in the remotest, most desolate part of the world sometimes sit down to a favorite meal, and feel real joy in eating it. Common love is common, love, and real.

Common love, however, the universal love of God, cannot be separated from common wrath. Because God is one, a simple being, you cannot wrap your arms around His love and miss the wrath. The Lord our God, the Lord is One. For the wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness, including the unrighteousness of ingratitude. The common love of God is connected with the common wrath of God right here, where Paul tells us of all natural men, For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him…” (Romans 1:21a). Though the lost will receive the loving gifts of God, they will neither honor Him, nor thank Him, and so earn His eternal wrath.

Which is precisely as He planned it. God’s love is not only inseparable from His wrath, but it is equally bound together with His sovereignty. That is, when God sends the rain to the unjust, He does so knowing that the unjust will not honor Him, and will not be thankful. But this doesn’t frustrate God. First, He planned it that way. And second, He planned it that way because of one more connection between love and wrath- God loves His wrath. He delights to manifest the infinite perfection of His wrath just as much as His love, because they are one thing.

This, in turn, must inform how we look at the world around us. The problem with the broader culture, that place where they love love, isn’t that they’ve embraced part of the truth, the pleasant part, and that our job as sound Christians is to teach them the hard parts. Rather we have to understand that the love they love is no more love than the god they worship is God. They are wrong on all counts. And unless they embrace the true and living God, the God of love that is wrath, of wrath that is love, of both that are manifest sovereignly, they will perish. Biblical love requires that we tell the world that their love of their love will earn them only His wrath.

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Two Thumbs Down

Posted on October 2, 2020 by RC

Neil Postman, in his delightful, albeit ominous, little book Amusing Ourselves to Death, draws an insightful comparison to two important dystopian novels. Utopian novels, of course, are those designed to show us edenic cultures. Dystopian novels show us hellish futures. The two Postman discusses are 1984 by George Orwell, and the slightly lesser known Brave New World, by Alduous Huxley. Both books alarm us, but in different ways. The citizens of 1984 are haunted and hunted by Big Brother, the embodiment of the statist dictator. Every moment of every day is both regimented and watched by the repressive state. In Brave New World, however, the citizens are in a certain sense not at all oppressed. They don’t live in fear of the state. They are enslaved more by the carrot of pleasure and entertainment while in 1984 they are enslaved by the stick of torture and the secret police. What if, Postman asks, we were all on our guard for 1984, but what snuck up on us was Brave New World?

Winston, the “hero” of 1984 works as a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Truth. He is both a censor and a revisionist historian. The past is changed to fit the needs of the regime, and truth is sent to burn up after being sent to the memory hole. One of his friends has a slightly different job- culling the nation’s dictionary. Here the goal isn’t merely to rid the book of outmoded words, but to rid the language of dangerous thoughts. By whittling the language down the state could whittle away the capacity of its citizens to even think in terms of freedom and liberty. Is it possible that all our communication conveniences in our so-called “Information Age” are, in a manner of speaking, an assault on language and liberty, but from the perspective and approach of Brave New World? Have we, with emails, tweets and texts 4gotn how 2 thnk? Have we entered a brave new world not with our fingers in our ears, but our thumbs on our keypads?

Postman argues persuasively that levels of discourse can certainly raise or fall, and that such may be the fruit of given technologies. His argument is that with the advent of television we ceased to be a word based culture and were rapidly becoming an image based culture. Images, as a medium, are much better than words at evoking emotions. They are much less effective than words at communicating abstract ideas. I recall coming to realize just how dumbed down our culture had become when a student in seminary. One of the key books we were assigned to read for our systematic theology course was The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. I read both volumes, finding them rich, helpful, but by no means an easy and comfortable read. I was ashamed, however, to consider Calvin’s goal in writing this work- it was designed to be a primer, a basic introduction to the Christian faith for laypeople. And there I was not only reading it as a text in my seminary, but finding it among the more difficult books in the whole of my studies.

Perhaps stranger even than our growing ignorance, is our concomitant growing confidence in our wisdom. Instead of looking to the ancients as our betters, we seen them as hopelessly undereducated rubes. Reading the epistles in the Bible, however, ought to disabuse us of our foolish pride. We might be tempted to escape this conclusion by remembering our doctrine of inspiration. Paul, Peter, John, all the authors of all the epistles had some rather potent help along the way. When the omniscient God of heaven and earth is superintending your writing, you can certainly reach depths of wisdom that you might not have reached on your own. Communication, however, is a two way street. What we learn from reading the epistles is not just the brain power behind the writing of them, but the brain power behind the reading of them. Like Calvin’s Institutes, the New Testament epistles were written by and large for lay people, pew sitters, regular folk.

The readers of these letters, while they were certainly blessed to have pastors and teachers as we do, to help them understand, likely did not sit down over the course of a year or three to dissect these letters, word by word. They didn’t spend a month of Sundays on I Corinthians 1:1a, before daring to move on the next month to 1:1b. Instead they received these letters as letters. They understood them as letters. They submitted to them as letters.

As education gadfly John Taylor Gatto has wisely argued, we are being dumbed down by our own state school systems. That is 1984. But we are also dumbing ourselves down by refusing to sit, be still, and to read reasoned discourse that moves sequentially from one thought to the next, communicated in complete sentences. That is our Brave New World. Our calling then is not to live as the citizens under 1984. Nor should we see ourselves as the vapid consumers of Brave New World. Instead we are called to seek first a different kingdom. Instead we are to seek His righteousness. We find both in the Word of Him who is the Word. May we drink deeply of that Word, that we might walk rightly with that Word.

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Voting; Time Travel Movies; Acting a Sin?

Posted on October 2, 2020 by RC

Today’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast

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Is Christianity a religion, or a relationship?

Posted on October 1, 2020 by RC

Yes. There are, of course, all manner of things that separate the Christian faith from all other faiths. Ours is the story of God condescending to us, rather than we climbing to Him. Ours is a story grounded in history, and eyewitnesses. And most importantly of all, ours is true. If then religion means merely how man earns God’s favor, if religion is merely the myths of our fathers, if religion is but the lies men tell themselves to feel better about themselves, then of course, Christianity is no religion.

It is, however, perfectly appropriate to use the term religion as “that set of dogmas, institutions and practices by which a supreme being is submitted to and worshipped.” In this sense, of course Christianity is a religion. Our faith is not merely grounded in but subsists in historical realities. We are what we are, we do what we do, we believe what we believe, we proclaim what we proclaim precisely because a man and a woman disobeyed their Maker and plunged all their descendents into the vortex of the wrath of God, because God took on flesh and came as the New Man, and in space and time, under Pontius Pilate, lived a perfect life, died an atoning death, and walked out of His tomb three days later, alive. Forty days after that, this same Man, God in the flesh, ascended to His everlasting throne where He is now bringing all things under subjection. We are the people of the Story, the true Story.

What this aphorism, “Christianity is a relationship, not a religion,” is getting at however, is not only true, but important. That is, the Christian faith is not merely signing off on these historical events. “Yes, I believe this happened. Yes, I believe that happened.” The devil himself, along with his minions, can agree with the historical account (James 2:19). They can even agree with the sound interpretation of that history. They believe Jesus died for sinners. They believe men have peace with God as they repent and trust in His finished work alone. Trouble is, they hate the truths they can affirm (much like a godly person can affirm that the New England Patriots have won six Super Bowl championships, and hate that truth). They know the religion. Their relationship is all hate.

What we are affirming when we emphasize the relationship is that we delight not just in the truths about God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, but that we delight in them, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What we affirm, better still, is that because of these historical truths, we have not only been forgiven, but adopted, that we have been made the very children of God. Because of these historical truths, because of His love for us from eternity, we are indwelt by the Spirit. Because of these historical truths, because of what He did, we are the very bride of Christ. Because of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts, we are together the very family of God. Christianity isn’t then a relationship, but a series of relationships, all grounded not in a religion, but the religion.

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Bible in 5- II Samuel, WSC 43 and More…

Posted on October 1, 2020 by RC

Today’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast

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Savorless Salt or Normal Evil

Posted on September 30, 2020 by RC

When we are yet outside the kingdom, before we are born a second time, we suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1). This does not mean we are stupid. It does mean we are foolish. We know what we know, but because such knowledge exposes our guilt, we suppress it. We are born again when God the Holy Spirit changes us, replacing our hearts of stone with a heart of flesh, when that same Spirit indwells us, and cleanses us.

But we are not changed fully and instantly. We are still dirty. We are still, in ourselves, guilty. And we still seek to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Consider those Australian “ethicists” who some time ago published a “scholarly” article outlining why they thought “after-birth abortion” ought to be considered ethically acceptable. Their reasoning has a diabolical logic to it- there is no real difference between the baby before it is born and after it is born. We are free to kill the child in the first instance, why not in the second? This is a rather telling illustration of Romans 1 level foolishness. It ought not, however, surprise us. We’re dealing with unregenerate people here. This is the kind of thing they come up with.

It seems however that Christians were indeed surprised by this revolting development. Not just surprised, but outraged, furious, indignant and morally flabbergasted. We wrote learned pieces decrying this new evidence of cultural decline. We clucked and fretted on twitter and facebook. And, as is our wont, we missed the point. Because we are still dirty, we miss the blood on our own hands. If it is true, as these “ethicists” argue, and it is, that there is no moral difference between the practice of abortion or pre-natal infanticide and after birth abortion, or infanticide, why do we, who have been blessed by the indwelling Holy Spirit, get up in arms about one, and yawn over the other? Why the moral outrage over the moral outrage du jour, and the lack of moral outrage over the moral outrage of our generation?

We in the church are blind because we walk backwards, in the face of a decadent culture, drawing perpetual lines in the sand, boldly declaring “Thus far, and no further.” We’ve done it so many times we have forgotten where we came from. Our salt has lost its savor, and we are trodden underfoot. Abortion, the murder of babies in their mothers’ wombs, has, by virtue of the church’s relative ease on the matter now become distasteful, uncouth, and normal, like spitting on sidewalks. The Australian “ethicists” are not pushing the boundaries of their ethics; they are embracing the norms of our ethics.

We expose our hypocrisy, our callowness and shallowness when we protest after-birth abortion, sex-selection abortion, partial-birth abortion, late-term abortion, unsafe, unregulated abortion, Obamacare funded abortion, all the while living a business-as-usual life in the face of babies being butchered in our neighborhoods every day. The evil of killing babies is that they are babies, no matter their age, no matter whether they are born, no matter how they came to be, no matter what butchering technique is used. We, the living, must repent. Lord have mercy on our souls, and the souls of the babies we destroy.

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Elisha & the Bears; A Taste of Heaven; Shannon, Hero

Posted on September 30, 2020 by RC


Today’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast

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New Theses, New Reformation

Posted on September 29, 2020 by RC

Thesis 43 We must be humble about our ability to understand our neighbors.

One of the great evils of pop psychology, and there are many, is the pop part. That is, as psychology has been repackaged for mass consumption, it has left us all with a faulty understanding of the scope of our knowledge. Psychology promises the nearly God-like ability to see into people’s souls, to assess and judge their motives, to plum the subconscious, and read it like a news report. We’ve been told that we can read people’s body language, to get the message under the message. We put long dead authors on our little couch, pretending such will help us understand their works. And, worse still, we practice this prideful art with our neighbors.

Our pride, however, does not stop here. We not only are fools enough to think we can read other people, but, surprise surprise, what we read there tends to make our neighbor come out like a jerk, while we come out smelling like roses. We slant and twist their behaviors to shift blame to them, while vindicating ourselves. To put it another way, we are all, at heart, junior high girls. You remember these scenarios. Suzie is walking through the mall. She smiles and waves at Cindy, who doesn’t acknowledge the greeting. The next day the story makes the rounds, at school, or on the internet. Suzie declares, “I know Cindy saw me. She didn’t wave back. Cindy is so stuck up.” Of course the truth of the matter is that Cindy might not have seen Suzy. Maybe her glasses were all fogged up. Maybe it wasn’t even Cindy, but just someone who looked like Cindy. Maybe it didn’t even so much look like Cindy, but Suzy’s glasses were fogged up. Or maybe Cindy did see Suzy, but didn’t wave because she was too depressed. Maybe she was grieved over the problem of gossip.

We’re not in junior high any more, but we practice much the same thing. We do not look at facts, but instead put a spin on the facts, all driven by our utter confidence that we know the secrets of others. The Scripture, however, calls us to humility. We need to know our frame. We need to grasp the limits of our knowledge, and recognize our own propensity to spin things in our own favor. Even the disciples, after three years of sitting at the feet of Jesus, didn’t know themselves well enough to see their own way of twisting things during their argument over who would be greatest in the kingdom.

This may seem like a small thing. This, however, is how relationships are broken, friendships destroyed, families separated, even how churches are split. We do not have the humility to know what we cannot know. We do not have the humility to know that we are spinning things. And the love among the brethren is torn asunder, and the devil laughs. Repentance and humility, however, will cause the devil to flee, and cause brethren to dwell together in unity. Repentance and humility are the very oil pouring down the beard of Aaron.

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Pugilism; Love Is ii; What Are You Worried About?

Posted on September 29, 2020 by RC

Today’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast

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Ask RC- What do you find so appealing about Autumn?

Posted on September 28, 2020 by RC

People begin to notice, after a while, if they are paying the least bit of attention, that I love the Steelers, that I delight in CS Lewis, that I praise God for Lisa. You might have to be just a smidge more observant to notice that I am a huge fan of Autumn. Like, write odes to it, count down the days to it, giggle over it, lobby others to embrace its pumpkin spice glory. I’d mourn inconsolably each time it came to an end were it not true that I’m also a big fan of winter. But why? What’s the appeal?

First, it’s not summer. Summer is hot and hot is bad. I’ve spent enough time in Florida to have a lifetime worth of hot. Summer also has inordinately long days. Autumn does not. It gets dark when it’s supposed to. Dark and cool is cozy; hot and bright not so much.

Second, Autumn is mostly when the Steelers play. It’s true they also usually play in the Winter, on account of being so great and everything, and usually being in the playoffs. But Autumn is when the season starts. Even if your favorite team isn’t good, you know, like the Steelers are good, Autumn is that part of the season when they still have a chance. For some of you it’s college football, and for others still, high school football. It’s homecoming, festival season, sweaters and hoodies, frost and the sight of our own breath in the morning.

Third, fires, s’mores, hot cider, hearty soups.

Fourth, and likely most importantly, Autumn is the beginning of the end. It is the slowing down that leads to the rest of the Winter, the preparing for a long Winter’s nap. As such it is a yearly reminder of what lies behind and what lies ahead. The falling of the leaves remind us both that death comes to us all, and that leaves are not made to cover our sins. But there is hope in the falling leaves as well. For they are the cover that protects the ground, and as Autumn progresses, they become the food that will feed the Spring. It is the dying that must come before the resurrection, the reminder of all that we have lost.

Nothing communicates this more to me than the smell of Autumn. There is a marriage most strange that is carried by the chilling winds. That smell is the rotting of the leaves, the slow, steady decay that at one and the same time hints at death and speaks of the fecundity to come. Life and death kiss. Raking the leaves gives us our last natural outdoor sweat. Jumping into the pile is one more reminder that we were once young. And burning the leaves turns that smell into incense, an offering of praise to the Lord of the Dance of the Seasons.

A better man would be able to praise every season with the same fullness. He, after all, made them all. But He made me too, and gave me a special love for this season. So this is my homage.

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