The Theme Song of Our Lives by Jethro Tull: Nothing is Easy!

The Theme Song of Our Lives by Jethro Tull: Nothing is Easy!

Sep 21, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

To my family the title of this post is nothing new. I’ve quoted the title of the song so many times by this point all I get is eye rolls. I used to call it the Disney eye roll when my kids were younger, but I would think Woke-Disney no longer has characters do eye rolls; that’s so 90s. It’s amazing to me that we as Christians allow the hardness of life to mess with our faith, and by “faith” I mean the Greek word for it, pistis-πίστις, or trust. God through Isaiah (26:3) says, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.” How often do you have “perfect peace”? Yeah, me neither. It’s also amazing to me how often we allow circumstances, or more accurately our perception of them, to determine whether we have “perfect peace” or not. Of course, this should surprise none of us because we are all of Adam’s seed, fallen creatures through and through. And it’s hard! Ian Anderson says so. Chances are he didn’t know the reason why is found in Genesis 3, when Eve believed the serpent that if she just ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she could “be like God knowing good and evil.” Uh, no you won’t.

The message of the song, Ian Anderson being the good stiff-upper-lip Brit, is in the title of another popular song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” And why should we not worry according to Anderson? Just “smile in a while” and you’ll get happy his way. The reason this can only work to a limited degree and not ultimately is related to one of my favorite words and concepts: telos, a Greek word from which we get our word teleology, which is the study of purposiveness or of objects regarding their aims, purposes, or intentions. I’m going to get a bit philosophical, so bear with me. I trust the payoff will be worth it.

To Aristotle there were four causes for why things come to be.

1. First is the formal cause, or the idea of the thing in the mind before it comes to fruition. Someone can’t build a chair until they have the idea of the chair in their mind.
2. Second is the material cause, or the thing out of which the chair will be made, the wood.
3. Then there is the efficient cause, or the person making the chair.
4. Finally is the formal cause, or the telos, the purpose for which the chair is made, to sit on.

Today we only think of the efficient cause as the reason something comes to exist, but for Aristotle it was a far richer concept. In Aristotle’s concept of cause, we find the answer to dealing with life being hard, and it isn’t just making a decision to not worry, smile, and be happy. It’s hard to ignore getting hit in the face with a brick—deciding it doesn’t really hurt isn’t going to help. Sometimes when it gets really hard life can feel like a pile of bricks falling on your head, or it can be just run of the mill hard like those pesky mosquitos that won’t leave you alone. We find the ultimate answer in the first question and answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the formal cause of human existence:

What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

And not only the formal cause, but the three others as well. We existed in the mind of God before the world was created; He is the formal cause of our existence. He made earth so out of that He might create man; as David says, we are fearfully and wonderfully made; the material cause is the earth on which we live. The efficient cause is God making us through the vicissitudes of life, the hardness of it, the person He wants us to become. The formal cause, the telos of our existence is given in the pithy answer by the Westminster divines: to glorify God and enjoy him forever. The question is, do we really believe this, do we fully buy into it. Do we accept what Paul says, that in God “we live and move and have our being.” Do we really believe there are no accidents, that when it comes to our lives chance doesn’t exist? That God is truly in control of all things?

The ultimate cause is of course Jesus Christ. In him it doesn’t matter how hard the hard gets, we’re promised the ultimate telos (Rom. 8:28):

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

And notice: we can know this, not wonder or speculate, but have certainty that every single thing that happens in our live works for our good and God’s glory. Every. Single. Thing. Not most things, or ninety-five percent of things, but all things. And what is this purpose Paul speaks of? He continues:

29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

God is the all-powerful, all knowing, all knowledgeable, all creative, all wise, all loving, all good efficient cause transforming us into the image of His Son. Talk about living a life of meaning, purpose, and hope! Talk about waking up every day excited to see what God has planned for us for the day. And as Christians we are the ultimate realists. Paul implies that all things are not good, but God works them all together for our good, even the hard stuff, especially the hard stuff. We have the encrusted barnacles of sin that are attached to our fallen natures, and it hurts to have God scrape them off. And sometimes we sing with Anderson, “Nothing is easy!” But in expecting and accepting that the hardness is necessary for the telos of our existence makes the hard things so much easier.

The other option in our secular culture is to believe we’re cosmic accidents, products of chance with no inherent telos other than what we can conjure up in our own imagination and hope to nothing that it works. Darwin gave us the gift of meaninglessness, and as we witness all around us, it is the gift that keeps on giving. We live in the most prosperous and powerful society in the history of the world, but last year almost 50,000 people killed themselves. How many more tried? How many others just live lives of quiet desperation and loneliness going from experience to experience hoping to find “happiness” and fulfillment, thinking the God shaped vacuum at the center of their being can somehow be filled by something other than God. It can’t.

Meaning is ultimately impossible to conjure up living in between poles of meaninglessness. In the secular view of reality, we come from nothing and we are headed to nothing; oblivion is our destiny. When life gets hard it has no other purpose or meaning than it’s just hard, and nobody likes that! No wonder so many people are so miserable. For Christians, though, Paul prefaces the above verses with this blessed truth that gives all things meaning for us:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

If we really, truly believe this, and trust in God, we can sometimes have a semblance of peace and even if it’s not perfect, it glorifies God and is good for us. But nobody said it would be easy!

 

Habakkuk 3: Will We Trust the Lord When Everything Looks Like We Shouldn’t?

Habakkuk 3: Will We Trust the Lord When Everything Looks Like We Shouldn’t?

Jul 28, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

If we’re honest, we don’t tend to live by faith (i.e., trust) in God, but by circumstances. If our circumstances are hunky dory, to our liking, we’re happy, if not we moan and complain. I like to think we naturally stop doing this in the process of growing in maturity, of growing up, of overcoming this penchant to act like children, but growing up isn’t easy. It is, however, necessary. For Christians this process is called sanctification, or being made holy by God. As I was going through my own sanctification process in life at some point I realized how hard it was. By nature I found I’m a moaner and whiner, and I tended to see myself as a victim easily seduced by self-pity. I came up with a phrase not too long ago some four decades into this process: the pain of sanctification.

Being molded and shaped by Almighty God into the image of his Son is not fun, nor for the faint of heart, but the fruit is sweet. If we really want God to have his way with us, it will get ugly. Our feelings will be hurt, and as Tim Keller always said, He will crush us. It is often an emotional struggle. The reason is that, as Jesus said (John 16:8), when the Holy Spirit comes, “he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.” The Greek for convict, elegchó- ἐλέγχω is a tough one: reprove, rebuke, discipline, expose, show to be guilty. That word expose is especially scary. Who wants to be exposed? Not me! In fact when I was younger in the Lord I was afraid of asking God to have his way with me, to expose my sin. Now I plead with him to do it because of one very important word, in fact I’ve learned the most important word in the Christian faith: trust. Yes, it’s right up there with love, but trust has to come first because loving God, ourselves, and our neighbors is the fruit of trust.

As I finished the book of Habakkuk and read these final verses that word trust came to mind, and how difficult it can be to exercise it if we live by circumstances:

17 Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
    he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
    he enables me to tread on the heights.

In the ancient world when almost everyone lived on farms and grew their own food nothing could be worse than this. It’s not just some empty store shelves like we experienced in the last few years that for us is a slight inconvenience, but imagine walking into every store in your city and they are all empty! Might we just panic? When everything that sustains life is gone what do we do? Freak out! Yet here is Habakkuk saying it doesn’t matter because he will choose a different response which will not be determined by the circumstances: trust.

I’ve found as I’ve grown older in the faith and in life that my greatest sin is not one of my most obvious sins, but my lack of trust in God. And because of that I’ve found that one of my favorite verses in the Bible is the most convicting, Isaiah 26:3:

You will keep him in perfect peace
   him whose mind is steadfast,
   because he trusts in you.

 If I don’t have perfect peace, I don’t trust in God. It’s as binary as you can get. I can say that sometimes in life I think I might have such peace, but I’ve found over the years I’m not really good at the whole perfection thing. So I’ve come to my default position in my daily prayers: I repent of this lack of trust every day. It’s reflected in things like fear, worry, anxiety, doubt, impatience, anger, and being easily annoyed. Oh, how easily annoyed I can be! After four plus decades as a Christians and God’s sanctifying work in my life, I think I’m a little better in putting my tendency to annoyance in abeyance, but its never easy. I have to constantly be aware that I just threw perfection out the window.

Where do all these attitudes and emotions not honoring to God come from? Living by circumstances and not by faith. The Greek word translated as faith or belief in the New Testament is pistis- πίστις: “Properly, persuasion (be persuaded, come to trust).” I really like the way Strong’s Concordance puts that because God never, ever requires “blind” faith, or faith without reason. This is very important to understand for a couple reasons. 

  1. The first is atheists pushing the lie that Christians (i.e., “religious people”) need faith because there is no evidence for what they believe. Or at best the evidence is so weak they have to take a “leap” of faith. In the words of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, faith is believin’ what you know ain’t so. Thus people who are “not religious” supposedly don’t need “faith.” This is of course garbage because there is in fact an ocean’s worth of evidence pointing to Christianity’s veracity and that it’s worthy of our trust.
  2. The other reason is more important. The kind of faith that seeks the blessing of perfect peace in Him is, to coin a phrase, persuasive faith. In other words, God persuades us throughout our lives in relationship with Him (meaning we daily seek Him in his word, prayer, and in fellowship with His people, see 7:7) that we can trust Him, that He is trust-worthy, worthy of trust. He will never leave us out to dry even when “the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food. 

I will end this with a brief story. My sister-in-law was over for a visit recently, and we were talking God and things, and having recently read Habakkuk these verses were on my mind. So I pulled out my Bible at our dining room table and read the passage. Or should I say I tried to read the passage. When I got to, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord,” I could not get the words out, the tears wouldn’t let me. I’m not exactly sure why passages like this do that to me sometimes. Is it because I can approximate such trust at times, or that I’m so bad at it? I think it’s the latter because no matter how bad I continue to be at it, God in Christ loves me anyway, and continues to love and sanctify me so that I can approximate it a little more every day, and experience its blessings. Who doesn’t want peace of mind and heart rather than anxiety, fear, worry, and doubt? It’s a rhetorical question. 

When we realize just how unworthy we are, yet God loves us anyway because of Christ, tears are the appropriate response, but the emotions are not something we can manufacture because we think it’s the right thing to do. Relationships don’t work that way. They are dynamic, alive, unpredictable, coming when we least expect them, and hard to control. God in us, in Christ, in the person of the Holy Spirit is real, and the truth of who He is and what He’s done for us is stunning to contemplate. The more you do, the more real it becomes, and you won’t be able to help the emotions either.

 

“He walked away from his evangelical roots to escape feeling suffocated”

“He walked away from his evangelical roots to escape feeling suffocated”

Jul 21, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

That is the title of an NPR interview of Jon Ward in what I was sure would be a typical “deconversion” story, as they call it nowadays, especially given it’s leftwing mainstream media NPR. In case you haven’t noticed, corporate media despises, yea, loathes conservative Christianity of any stripe. So here, I thought, was yet another story of a Christian who abandoned his faith. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t, but there are some important takeaways from his story we can learn from, positive and negative.

The first comes from the title of the book he wrote and thus the interview, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation. This paints with a brushstroke entirely too broad. He experienced one slice of this so-called movement, and to imply it represents the whole is not accurate. I’m sure he would admit as much, but in the interview he’s not clear about that, or if he was, I missed it. The title of the book, though, is unfortunate and adds to the secular culture’s desire to denigrate and discredit Christianity. I listen to a lot of testimonies, people who’ve embraced Christianity for many reasons, all of which they obviously find helpful. Did the “movement” fail them? I’ve been a Christian over 44 years, and the only thing that’s failed in all that time is me! The God of Christianity revealed in creation, Scripture, and Christ has most definitely never failed even though we, his children, often do. As the famous hymn says, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love.”

Having said this, what he experienced was real and I can relate to his aversion to it. It sounded like a narrow kind of Pentecostal Christianity that didn’t do well with questions or doubt. I know those kind of Christians and congregations exist, but to imply or insinuate that’s a feature of Evangelical Christianity and not a bug is inaccurate. I’m confident most conservative Christians and congregations are not at all like this because that’s been my experience over all these years, and I’m sure most Christians would attest to the same. I’m not saying, however, this isn’t a problem, only that it’s a narrower one, and most importantly not exclusively a Christian problem. It is a human nature problem because people are sinners. Dogmatic narrowness and an unwillingness to entertain questions is in fact a common human malady. We find it in people of every religious stripe, and even those who think they are not at all religious (of course they are). Can anyone say . . . .  woke? Who are the most dogmatically narrow people on earth in the 21st century? Wokesters! And if you dare question them you will be silenced! Talk about a movement that failed a generation.

Speaking specifically of Christians inflicted with this myopia, though, I’ve seen it in my fellow Reformed and Calvinist Christians, but also in Arminians, Pentecostals and Charismatics, Roman Catholics and Orthodox, Bible believing non-denominational types, and every permutation in between. The problem, and this is something Ward highlights in the interview and I’d guess in the book, is the need for people to feel or think they are right. I agree with him. This is something I learned through many years and many mistakes as God was slapping me around, or as Tim Keller used to say all the time, crushing me. Thankfully, he’s really good at putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. This is not to say we should not want to be right. Who really wants to be wrong? I would guess nobody. But the question, and Ward highlights this, is can we admit we might be wrong. Dogmatism, the prototypical know-it-all, is not a terribly attractive trait because that person could never admit he just might be wrong. Or if he, or she, did, it would only be grudgingly.

Speaking of Christians, I’m afraid too many of us put our faith in our rightness rather than in Christ. I know for many years I did, but as I grew up realized just how little I know. It’s a cliché, but the more we know the more we realize we don’t know, or should. I’ve also come to realize how little we know when we declare the meaning of certain passages of Scripture, specifically things we simply can’t know even though many people pontificate confidently on them. But details of what those might be aren’t important, but what is, is our attitude when we come to the revelation of God in Scripture. Need I say our knowing should be in humility? In that we could maybe, possibly, perchance be wrong? That’s what Ward kept saying, maybe I’m wrong. In his experience he said he didn’t encounter that much.

Some people, a la Descartes, believe absolute certainty is not only attainable for finite human beings, but a worthy goal. But think about it for one second and you’ll realize by definition the finite can never be absolute. Our knowledge is always limited, which is why as I grew older it turns out one of my favorite verses in the Bible is about just how little we really know, I Corinthians 8:2: “If anyone thinks he knows anything, he does not yet know as he ought to know.” Paul in context is not calling for skepticism, that we can’t know, but for epistemological humility. We can and should have strong convictions though we must hold them firmly but lightly. Unfortunately that appears to be a problem for many people.

Human nature is a funny, perplexing, and utterly predictable thing, and the latter trait goes back to the garden and what we call the fall. It’s fascinating to realize that man’s fall from a state of fellowship with his Creator comes down to epistemology, a la Satan’s temptation, “you will be like God knowing Good and evil.” So it’s not surprising that our knowing, or the limited nature thereof, is such a significant part of our fallen condition, creating conflict, doubt, arrogance, pride, as well as blessing. It all depends on the attitude of the knower, doesn’t it. I’ve come to realize that as much as I love knowing and growing in knowledge, it’s far more important that I am known, as Paul follows up the above verse with, “But if anyone loves God, he is known by Him.” And in Galatians 4:9 he writes, “now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God. . .” Because I don’t trust myself, I often pray a couple verses of a Psalm of David (139):

23 Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

As we are reminded by Jeremiah (17:9), “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” I heard Jordan Peterson, who has studied evil maybe more than any living human being, say something amazing about this deceitful heart of ours. Speaking of certain psychopaths, he said as they go down the labyrinth of depravity they are especially good at “the self-deception of their self-description.” As my father used say, people believe their own BS. He added, “You get to that lie by a thousand different micro-lies.” Might I remind all of us that we are all susceptible to “the self-deception of our own self-description,” and believing our own BS? Not to mention “micro-lies”? Which is why I pray the Psalm 139 verses so fervently and often because I don’t trust my deceitful heart, but I can trust our Savior God who in His almighty power in Christ by the Holy Spirit promises to “lead me in the way everlasting.”

Ecclesiastes 8:17 – No One Really Comprehends and God’s Revelation

Ecclesiastes 8:17 – No One Really Comprehends and God’s Revelation

Feb 26, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

In my recent read through the book of Ecclesiastes, I came to appreciate the seemingly contradictory perspectives of the author, who most accept as Solomon given how he identifies himself in the first verse: “The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.” There were no kings in Israel’s long history who had the wealth and peace during their reigns to have the time to contemplate how meaningless life is “under the sun.” It takes a man of wealth and leisure with plenty of time on his hands to get to a point where he would conclude:

2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?

Here’s a cynic Woody Allen could appreciate. Yet the Teacher combines a healthy dose cynicism with a humility that realizes how little we as finite human beings can really know “under the sun.” Doing a Bible word search, we find the Teacher in our English Bibles using the phrase in the 12 chapters of the Book 27 times. I think we can safely say life on earth, not one oriented toward a heavenly city, is the dominant theme. Yet we also find him using the word God, Elohim in the Hebrew, 37 times. It is interesting, though, that he never uses the Israel’s covenant name for God, Yahweh, but the generic reference to God, El. Given his international celebrity, it’s likely his intended audience went beyond the people of Israel.

Speaking of word searches, he also uses the word meaningless some 30 times. The ESV and KJV translate that Hebrew word as vanity, defined in a variety of ways as empty, valueless, hollowness, worthlessness, futile. The Hebrew word means vapor or breath, and is also translated in various ways as such as empty, delusion, fleeting, fraud, or futile. We get the point, over and over and over again. Yet in the midst of all this futility and frustration he ends with what ultimately matters:

13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the duty of all mankind.
14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.

What prompted me to write about Ecclesiastes this time through was the Teacher’s statement in chapter 8 that after he had seen all God had done:

No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it.

This hasn’t stopped human beings from trying to do just that for all of recorded history. The speculative history of philosophy, and the many varieties of religion over the ages speak to the futility of this endeavor. Man is an ultimate meaning seeking creature, even if most of the time he gets it wrong. The problem is that because of sin and man’s rebellion against God, we don’t seek Him. Jesus told us as much when he said to Nicodemus that we can’t even see the kingdom of God unless we are born again. No one chooses to be born or has any say in the matter, and Jesus doesn’t use his metaphors carelessly.

Which brings us to the Christian concept of revelation, that God has broken into the box of reality in which we find ourselves to reveal what it’s ultimately all about, or else we would be forever benighted. That word means being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness, unenlightened. If not for God breaking into the box of human existence to tell us what it all means, we are stuck with speculation and endless guessing leading nowhere but to more speculation and guessing, bumping into walls of existence concluding maybe there’s nothing outside the box after all. Human beings throughout history without revelation have concluded if there is something outside of the box, it is either not knowable, or if it is some kind of God not definable or personal, more of a force than a being we can related to on a personal level. I love the box metaphor which I learned a long time ago from the great Dutch Art Historian Hans Rookmaaker. The box of which I speak is closed and hermetically sealed because of sin, there is no way out, we are stuck.

If you want to really appreciate the value of God’s revelation to his creatures, become familiar with the history of philosophy and religion. In my Christian journey I’ve gotten to the point in my appreciation where I thank God almost every morning when I pray that he has revealed himself in three ways: creation, Scripture, and Christ. Creation drives us to Scripture which reveals God’s plans and actions in history to redeem his creation in the person and work of Christ. And as C.S. Lewis so perfectly put it:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Yet as the author of Ecclesiastes knows, comprehending, fully understanding, what goes on “under the sun” is not so simple, and in fact ultimately impossible. Yet we know enough per the Teacher just from creation (“under the sun”) that God is there and should be feared and obeyed. We also learn from Paul in Romans 1 that all human beings know enough to be “without excuse.” Then God breaks into the human heart by the power of the Holy Spirit, opening our eyes to the true ultimate meaning of existence: a redeemed relationship with our Creator through the person and work of Christ. Only a work by God outside of creation, what we often call super-natural, is the only way the box doesn’t remain our metaphysical prison.

The beauty of Christianity (the facets of stunning beauty of the diamond of salvation are limitless, literally) is that while we can know, have true knowledge because of God’s three-fold revelation, we as Paul says, “see through a glass darkly.” That is the King James Version of I Corinthians 13:12. Other translations use the word mirror and only seeing in it a dim reflection. In the first century there were no mirrors as we have them today. The Greek phrase Paul uses is esoptrou en ainigmati (ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι). The first word is glass or mirror, and in the ancient world were made of polished metal so it was difficult to get an accurate reflection. The second word means riddle or enigma. In the words of the Teacher, we really can’t comprehend what we’re seeing.

Yet what we can comprehend because true knowledge is revealed to us, we know in absolute humility and use in the love and service of others. We often hold our knowing far too firmly. Some even have a hard time admitting they could possibly be wrong . . . . about anything! As I’ve been a while along this journey with Jesus I know more then ever how little I really know, and I am far better able to know what I don’t know than what I do. In fact, Paul says it is better to be known by God than to know him, and only the latter leads to the former, even as we love because he first loved us.

The “Health and Wealth” Gospel of Proverbs

The “Health and Wealth” Gospel of Proverbs

Feb 15, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

As I was reading through Proverbs recently for the first time in a long time, it almost made me believe there is such a thing as a health and wealth gospel. Notice the g in gospel is not capitalized so we’re not confusing it with The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and our eternal salvation in Him. Nonetheless, when we do certain things we can have a reasonable expectation certain other things will follow as day follows night and that is good news. In a very real sense, there is no blessing from God that we do not earn.  In the Bible it’s called sowing and reaping because most of the audience to whom Scripture was written had to do that to live. We do too, it’s just not in the ground, unless of course you’re a farmer.

This, in fact, is the inheritance of Judaism and Christianity. We don’t live in the heathen/pagan universe the Hebrews were born into when Yahweh called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. God rescued us from the dead-end worldview of a universe without hope through the Hebrew people. Because of the importance of the Jewish nature of Jesus’ world, in Uninvented I referenced a book by Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Change the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. Cahill describes how the ancient world, no matter what culture or part of the world, knew nothing of an almighty, all-powerful Creator God until the Israelites came along. Heathens, by contrast, believed in gods, plural, who were just like them, only more powerful. Now humanity had agency, meaning they could change things, and that did in fact change everything! It was Christianity that brought this Hebrew conception of reality to the entire world, and without Christianity the world would be a much less pleasant place.

However, I must offer one caveat before the non sequiturs start flying. I am not saying all sowing guarantees reaping wonderful, positive results. We can’t guarantee anything and are in control of nothing. We can live out Proverbs to the T, grow wealthy and prosperous, and a plane can fall out of the sky on our house and kill us. A farmer’s beautiful crops can be wiped out by a tornado or hurricane, or locusts. The point in a way isn’t even about the results of our sowing, although of course it is. Rather it is trusting God. This trusting Him, or not, is the most important lesson I’ve learned in my four plus decades walking with Jesus, and learning just how much I suck at it. I’m always tempted to worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, i.e., not trusting Him, so daily I repent of my lack thereof, and plead for God to help me to trust Him.

I can relate to the story of Jesus healing a boy of an unclean spirit told in Mark 9. The father is desperate to have Jesus heal his boy who had a spiritual and physical malady since he was a child, and he pleads with Jesus to heal him. He specifically asks if Jesus can do anything about it, and Jesus said if the man can believe, all things are possible for those who believe (i.e., trust). I love the father’s desperate reply (in the KJV):

24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

I often pray, sometimes desperately, Lord, I trust you, help thou my lack of trust! And that includes in the cause-and-effect relationship of his creational order in my life. I now read the book of Proverbs through the lens of trust in the God who made the reliable reality spoken of in it.

It was some years ago that I slowly began to learn this lesson because I’m a slow learner. Once I do get something, though, I really do get it. I’ve always been the kind of person naturally lacking trust in God, who was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yeah, this or that great thing happened, but maybe disaster is right around the corner. To say this is dishonoring to God would be a massive understatement. Somewhere along the way in all my listening to learn, I heard someone reference Proverbs 10:22, and I was instantly convicted:

ESV: The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.

NIV: The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, without painful toil for it.

NIV 1978: The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, and he adds no trouble to it.

The idea is simple but obviously hard for many of us to accept: God just flat out wants to bless us! As I very often talk about here, he doesn’t want us to live in worry, fear, doubt, or anxiety, and even commands we don’t engage in such harmful futility. What do those things come from after all? An imagination of disaster, and disasters that 99% of the time never happen! We live in the future unpleasantness that doesn’t exist instead of the present pleasantness that does. How dumb is that! We’re sinners, it comes naturally.

Clearly God wants us to succeed at life. What that looks like will obviously be different for each one of us, but he hasn’t kept the recipe for success a secret. We can be sure of one thing, though; it isn’t going to fall out of the sky on our head. Nor will we get “lucky,” hit the lottery, or get to home without going to first, second, and third.

The first several chapters of Proverbs talk about wisdom, and how important it is to search for it and seek it and do everything we can to get it. It is we’re told, more precious than gold or silver. If we do seek it, work at getting it, we’re promised the payoff will be huge. I guess the question for all of us is, how hard do we really seek it and work at getting it. The plethora of resources at our fingertips today is stunning. The contrast is remarkable even to fifteen or twenty years ago, unimaginable even in the last century. Growing in knowledge that leads to wisdom is available to anyone who really wants it.

I have a strong conviction related to this seeking of wisdom. The more knowledge I have about more things, the more resources God can use teach me wisdom. However, growing in our knowledge must lead to a deep humility. Isn’t it obvious why that would be the case? The more we know the more we realize we don’t know. It’s like coming upon a trickle of water in a dry land and following it to its source only to find out it’s as massively large and as seemingly endless as the Great Lakes! In this vein I Corinthians 8:2 has become an encouragement to continue to realize how very little I really know: “If anyone thinks he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know.” Our knowing should be done lightly and with humility, and our knowledge used in service and love for others. Having this privilege is part of the health and wealth gospel of Proverbs because humility and loving others is woven throughout its pages.

Lastly, if we really want to be healthy and wealthy in a God honoring way, we have to be willing to question everything, and be willing change our minds about things we once held as certainties. This is a corollary of I Corinthians 8:2. Because we know so little about everything, we should at the least be willing, in humility, to consider new information and knowledge. Certainty is a good thing, but it can become a bad thing if we hold what we think we know so tightly we become deluded into thinking we own it. As if we were so omniscient that we could not possibly be wrong. Proverbs at the least teaches us that we need to be continually reminded what a gospel of true health and wealth looks like.

 

Jordan Peterson, Christianity, and the Human Psyche: It’s Complicated

Jordan Peterson, Christianity, and the Human Psyche: It’s Complicated

Nov 22, 2022 | Epistemology - Trust, Uncategorized

Jordan Peterson exploded on the scene six or seven years ago because he refused to bend the knee to woke orthodoxy. At the time he was a typical Canadian liberal, but the left drove him to the right. YouTube helped get his ideas into the mainstream, and his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, released in 2018 made him a sensation. It was especially meaningful for young men who have had their masculinity emasculated by the woke leftist secular culture. In case you’re not familiar with him, Peterson is a clinical psychologist and ex-professor. A 2019 documentary about him is a good introduction to the man, what drives him, and the reaction to him.

The Covid tyranny, which was especially bad in Canada, was what drove Peterson to finally fully embrace conservativism. Like many of us, he’s been red-pilled. And like many ex-liberals (liberal in the classical sense, not the progressive perversion of it) he has been stunned by the leftist takeover of what used to be a politics that believed in liberty. He’s realized a cultural version of Marxism is now what drives the left side of the political/cultural spectrum. The video below is a discussion specifically about the trans insanity that dominates Western culture and education. I’m not writing about that specifically, only to give you a good example of how the man thinks, and why it’s appealing to me, and so many others.

Although not an orthodox Christian yet, as far as I can tell, he’s an extremely effective apologist for Christianity. He comes at everything from a deeply psychological and nuanced perspective, and more than most he realizes Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization. More than that, he argues it uniquely gives meaning to human existence in the deepest sense (which is a favorite phrase of his, as is technically). If you watch/listen to the video, you’ll see how he challenges his interlocutor’s agnosticism/atheism. She fails to realize the only reason she’s repulsed by the trans insanity is Christianity!

What makes him especially appealing to me is that he gets the complexity of human existence and the human psyche. In fact, he says that in the video, that it’s complicated. Christians, as well as human beings in general, are given to simplistic thinking in dichotomous terms, either/or, one way or the other, black or white. We are perfectly free to view people this way but it’s not an accurate assessment of the human beings we encounter throughout our lives. This dichotomous thinking also applies to what we think we know or the knowledge we have.

If we’re to love people as we’re commanded, it helps to realize and accept that life is terribly complicated and messy. As they’ve grown up, I’ve taught my kids that every person they encounter has a history, and they are who they are as they stand in front of them because of that history. They’re not being, and you pick the annoying trait, obstinate or frustrating or petty or domineering, just to annoy us. It’s who they are! God brings them to us to teach us how to love them, not to insist they love us. It’s amazing how easy that is to get that backwards.

Related to this, I’ve learned from Peterson how little I know about how human beings, how the human psyche works. It reminds me of what has become one of my favorite verses as I’ve grown older and realize the more I know, the more I know I don’t know. In I Corinthians 8:2, Paul tells us:

The one who thinks he knows something does not know yet know as he ought to know.

As I always make sure people understand when I quote it, this is not a call for skepticism or cynicism, that’s we can’t know, or have confidence in what we think we know. Rather because of what Paul says in verse 1, that we all have knowledge, it’s a call for epistemological humility, which most people tend to lack. We always think we know more than we actually know.

It took me decades to begin to understand how little I really know, and in light of the infinitude of knowledge (because it all comes from our infinite Creator God), that is vanishingly small. When I was a young know-it-all, I saw my knowledge as earth size, not infinite for sure, but pretty impressive. As time went on that shrank to the size of a basketball, then in due course a golf ball (to bring up bad memories), and finally a pebble. Now I realize it’s the size of an atom! Invisible to the naked eye; that’s how little I know.

Again, it’s very important to understand what I am not saying. I know a lot, more than the average bear, but what’s more important is what I don’t know. That allows me to hold on to the knowledge I do have lightly, if tenaciously. My convictions about what I think I know are as strong as they’ve ever been, but I realize I’m looking at one grain of sand from all the seashores and deserts of the world, and then that doesn’t really capture it. My conclusion? We know confidently in humility. Our knowledge is to be used in love to the glory of God, for our good, and the good of others.