Most mornings when I pray I find myself thanking God for revealing himself in creation, Scripture, and Christ. I think how futile existence is without God’s revealing himself to us. Without that revelation, the human race is like a blind man in a dark box groping around without any way out. Every which way he runs looking for an exit he only finds a hard, cold wall, so he looks and runs harder. The history of philosophy is a perfect picture of the endless futility inside the box, speculation built upon conjecture based on assumptions based on nothing but human reason or human senses. Such thinking will only take humanity as far as human reason and senses can go, which is far, but not outside the box. The brilliance of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is a testament to just how far human thinking can take us, but soon descended into philosophies not nearly as brilliant, like Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Cynicism. Many other great thinkers came after, but without revelation it was all just a big intellectual food fight. (more…)
I’ve been a Christian for more than 42 years, and I am more blown away by the grace, mercy, and love of God in Christ than I have ever been. It continually astounds me how God in Christ can take lives wrecked by sin and guilt and shame, and turn them into something beautiful for their good and his glory. Some time last year I started listening to conversion testimonies I found online, and it’s been enlightening, to say the least. I’ve written about this previously, but I used to think testimonies were of limited value because they were essentially subjective, about a person’s experience of God, and not based on the objective truth revealed to us in Scripture. I no longer believe that because God’s work in his people’s lives is amazingly revelatory. And in every testimony I’ve heard salvation is accompanied by a desire to read the Bible and go to church. Experiences that don’t drive people to God’s word and God’s people are not from God. (more…)
It should be obvious that God is by definition incomprehensible, yet human beings, you and me included, somehow think we can comprehend him. This happens in subtle and not so subtle ways, but the pretension is the same. Somehow we think that our finite brains are capable of understanding the being of God, his ontology, the knowing of God, his epistemology, and his working, the how and why of it, both in creation and redemption (or re-creation). The ontological argument for God’s existence states that “God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.” Exactly. If we could conceive of anything greater he would not be God, he would be a figment of our imagination. Unfortunately, as sinners we are really good at creating a God that is a figment of our imagination. It just never bears any resemblance to the God who is actually there. (more…)
Death is, so to speak, a favorite topic of mine, and I’ve written about it here many times. I say “favorite” tongue in cheek, of course, because death is the topic we mortals most want to avoid talking about, let alone experience, whether that’s our own, or the death of those we love. We lost a friend this week to this most implacable foe, and as common as death is in the human experience, it never fails to shock us when it rears its ugly head. My first response when learning about this tragedy was, this can’t be! When a young man dies well before his time, no matter the circumstances, it hurts. Especially when it’s one you love and care about. So I knew I’d have to write something because when death comes knocking, I can’t just ignore it or explain it away. I’ve argued, in fact, that death is the great question mark of existence. It forces us to ask why it is, and why we hate it so. Any secular answer is supremely shallow and unsatisfying, but nothing takes away the sting. (more…)
I was going to write something on the dying of conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh, and before I got to that I listened to this interview from the Dallas Theological Seminary’s The Table podcast about embracing our mortality. That’s quite the counter intuitive notion, especially in our secular age, so I had to check it out. Given I think about death a lot, my own, but also death in general, I found the discussion right down my alley. Dr. J. Todd Billings, the interviewee, wrote a book calledThe End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Our Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live. He should know about the topic. He was diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2012, so immanent death is something he can’t help thinking, and writing, about. The reality for all of us is that our death’s are immanent as well. It may happen in five minutes, or in 50 years, but it will happen before we know it and are ready for it.
Since this is Christmas, and we’re focused on the miraculous birth of a baby over 2,000 years ago, a baby who would be the Savior of the world, I thought it an opportunity to broaden our focus on the one who made that birth possible. That would of course be the living God, all powerful, all knowing, all present. In all of biblical history there was no conception and birth like that of the young peasant girl Mary. Going back to Abraham and Sarah, there were several times when barren women beyond child-bearing years got pregnant, including Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, but they all got pregnant the old fashioned way. God being God, he was able to impregnate the virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we read about in Matthew and Luke. The old fashioned way, though, is every bit as miraculous, but we’re so conditioned by secular Western culture that we think women getting pregnant is somehow “natural.” There is nothing natural about it! (more…)
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