If God Promised Us a Rose Garden...

"The scripture tells us to be a prisoner of hope!  The world may tell you that you'll never get out of debt, that business is bad, but you just tell them, I can't help but hope for good things.  I'm a prisoner of hope!"
"Those who follow God's laws will gain in monetary wealth!  Repent and be baptized, and God will pour out of His cup a blessing you cannot contain!"

Such are the (paraphrased) promises of the prosperity gospel.  Basically, it tells us that, as Christians, we are entitled to material blessings from God.  God wants us to be happy, healthy, and wealthy--and if we do the right things, we will receive these blessings from Him.

There are a number of problems with this position.  Finer minds than mine have taken it upon themselves to write on the topic.  They have pointed out that the entire theology is backwards and egocentric, making everything revolve around pushing the right buttons to obligate God to do our will rather than seeking to do His--essentially reducing him to a Cosmic Vending Machine.  They have pointed out that, in the scriptures, "the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10), that one of the most critical of the Ten Commandments is "do not covet," and that Christ lambasted the wealthy with a fervor only paralleled by his venom for the religious (Matthew 19:24).  I do not want to cover the same ground, though I applaud those who have.

What I want to do instead is test the idea of a gospel of wealth not against the individual "proof texts" of scripture, but against its overall story.  Does the Bible, at bottom, present us with a story of a God who consistently overwhelms His faithful with material blessings--happy, healthy, wealthy lives--or does it tell a different story?  According to the gospel of wealth, if we do the right things, material blessings will always follow, and the Bible is full of the the stories of many people who followed God's commandments and did the right things.  It should logically follow, then, that the Bible is full of stories about extravagantly wealthy, healthy, and happy people, right?

This is where a problem appears, for in fact, the Bible is not a book where every page drips fine perfumes and tells of gilded halls inhabited by whole and happy people.  Rather, the Bible is a book where every page drips blood, sweat, and tears.  It is a book filled with enormous, unfathomable suffering, poverty, sickness, and even death.  According to prosperity gospel, these things should never befall the truly faithful, since they can simply claim God's blessing for their lives and enjoy material prosperity--so one would be tempted to say that all of the suffering in the Bible is just the wicked people, or maybe just the result of lack of faith on the part of those suffering.  But closer analysis shows that this is not so.  In fact, of the heroes of the faith, the truly righteous and faithful people of the Bible, only one of them seemed to enjoy material blessings because of his faithfulness toward God--King Solomon...and did I mention he suffered from depression (a la book of Ecclesiastes, the most down and depressing book in the Bible by far)?  Here is a brief survey of people in the Bible who didn't get a rose garden when they followed God.

• Able--The original righteous man deserves special mention.  He offered a more excellent sacrifice than his brother Cain (Hebrews 11:4).  His reward was being counted righteous by God...and materially-speaking being the first murder victim in human history.  I'm sure that was fun for him.
• Noah--The only righteous man in his generation ("blameless" in fact, Genesis 6:9).  His material reward was that he and his family were the sole survivors of a watery apocalypse that wiped out all other human life, after which they got to start out on a virgin world--rebuilding from an ecological catastrophe of unfathomable proportions that would have entailed enormous hardships...oh, and also the lifespans of his children and their offspring were cut to about 10% of the lifespan pre-Flood humans enjoyed.  It would be as if you and your kids had to start over after a nuclear winter killed everyone else and you had to face life knowing that your children would only make it to their fifties, your grandchildren to their forties, and that a few generations later your descendants wouldn't live past their teens.  Cheery thoughts.
• Abraham--Abraham is an interesting character in that he is one of the few people God promised material blessings.  Specifically, God promised him an innumerable host of descendants and an enormous tract of land including at least all of present day Israel, Lebanon, and parts of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt (conservatively).  God did eventually fulfill His promise, but neither Abraham nor his descendants for seven generations would live to see it.  Abraham himself spent his entire life as a nomad, living in a land that was not his own and dwelling in tents.  When he died, he had only one living heir, and owned no more land than a small burial plot.  This would be the extent of his descendants' real estate for more than a two centuries (longer than the sum total of American history).  He would pass on the expectation of a material blessing that never materialized two his son, grandson, and great-grandchildren, all of whom imparted promises of possessing large tracts of land, resources, and cities to their offspring only to have those offspring live their entire lives as landless nomads in strange territory.
• Jacob--Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, deserves special mention.  Like his forefathers, he looked toward the promised material blessing of land but never owned any.  While he was initially prosperous in other ways, famine reduced him to sending his children to beg bread in a foreign country.  Things became so desperate for him and his family that he willingly sent his favorite son to beg for food in Egypt knowing full well that it would probably result in his death.  As for health, Jacob was one of the aforementioned descendants of Noah who lived only a 10% of what was previously considered the normal human lifespan (and he knew it, describing the days of his life at one point as "few and evil").  It is true he was a dastardly little villain in his youth, but he pulled a 180 and did something that I'm sure any prosperity gospel preacher would consider a commendable act of faith.  He wrestled God and refused to let Him go without first receiving a blessing.  He was given a new name--and a limp that would stay with him for the rest of his days (so much for the blessing of health).  As for getting blessed with happiness...well, the guy had more family drama and domestic violence in his household than half of our cable networks put together.
• Joseph--As a young man, Joseph was a paragon of virtue amidst the dark feuding of Jacob's wild family.  His father favored him (not really because of this, more so due to the fact that he was the child of his favorite wife) and gave him material blessings, including an expensive and impressive coat.  His brothers took it away, tossed him in a hole, and sold him to human traffickers.  After being bought up by the Egyptians--whose ancient slave labor is infamous even today--he was thrown into prison and left to rot there as a direct result of his doing the right thing and refusing to violate God's sanction against adultery.  When he used his divinely given dream-interpreting gifts to help a friend in prison get out, the friend immediately forgot about him.  Joseph's life did eventually turn around for the better, but he had to take some enormous lumps along the way.
• Moses--Moses was adopted into the royal Egyptian family.  He was a prince of Egypt, enjoying its immense power and wealth, the finest education and healthcare in the then-known world...and then God came along.  Moses lost all of that.  He spent the next forty years as a herdsman in the desert.  After that, he returned to Egypt only to be scorned by his own people and the Egyptians as he struggled to set the enslaved Israelites free.  When he was finally successful, his material reward was wandering around the desert with the whiniest people on the planet using him as their designated complaint department.  While Egyptians died with style and were buried in massive monuments that impress tourists to this day, Moses was buried in an unmarked grave at a funeral that nobody attended.
• David--David was a man after God's own heart.  He was the man God chose to rule the kingdom of Israel as the first of a line that would stretch all the way to Christ.  And when God made this known to David, the young man's world fell apart.  He had become a famous warrior, a champion of Israel who stood at King Saul's right hand during parades.  But soon he was a fugitive, running through the wilderness, seeking shelter in caves and holes in the ground, begging for asylum in foreign cities, feigning madness to escape his enemies, grabbing a meal wherever he could (including the one place where the commandments laid down by God specifically said he was not allowed to).  When he did become king he still had to struggle all his life with family infighting and treason, including the awful experience of having one of his own sons killed by his trusted friends after said son ran him out of town and publicly had sex with all of David's wives on the palace rooftop.  Before David died, he also got to experience circulation problems which gave him perpetual chills.  Fun times.
• Solomon--An odd character, Solomon was the wisest, wealthiest, most powerful, and least happy man in the Bible.  His final work, the book of Ecclesiastes, is so dark and depressing that many Christians skip over it entirely.
• Jeremiah--A godly prophet in a godless time, Jeremiah and his friend and scribe Baruch were explicitly given a single material blessing from God for their service: survival.  They witnessed the capital city of their nation sacked multiple times.  They experienced poverty, brutal sieges, starvation, betrayal, arrest, imprisonment, and forced relocation to a foreign land (which was also sacked brutally as soon as they arrived).  He is known as "the weeping prophet" and wrote the only book of the Bible that compares with Ecclesiastes for unpleasantness and depressing content: the book of Lamentations, whose name literally means weeping.  The prophet is perhaps best known for his promise that God has plans for us "to prosper...and not to harm" us...but few remember the context of these words.  In context, they are a promise delivered to Jews taken as prisoners of war to a foreign land hundreds of miles from home, to whom Jeremiah has just delivered the news that neither they nor their children will ever see their homeland again, that they will remain exiles, foreigners in a strange land, for the next seventy years--oh, and by the way, they are the lucky ones!
• Job--God Himself declares Job to be a blameless and peerlessly righteous and faithful man.  He is one of the few people in the Bible God is explicitly said to have blessed materially with wealth, children, and health.  And then, God took it all away.  No act of faith on Job's part could make Him restore it.  Job suffered the most devastating personal catastrophe in human history.  In a single day he lost all of his children and all of his wealth (and the guy had a diversified portfolio, for pity's sake!).  Thereafter, his health went to pieces in a disgusting and humiliating way.  Thereafter, Job repeatedly confessed to having suicidal thoughts.  The consolation was that he got to keep his friends and wife--but this consolation came with a knife in the back because all of these people were apparently prosperity gospel preachers who thought that Jobs suffering was entirely his own fault and argued long and hard to prove it was so.  Eventually, God showed up to straighten things out, but never gave Job any kind of explanation for his devastating losses and intense suffering.
• Paul--Paul enjoyed a measure of prestige in 1st Century Palestine that few could afford or attain too.  He was born with Roman citizenship--the mark of the upper-crust of Imperial society that many spent fortunes trying to attain.  He was also born with an impressive Jewish pedigree.  He studied under the greatest religious teachers of his day and became renowned among them, surpassing all of his peers.  He had health, wealth, prestige...everything a man could want.  Then, he met Jesus on the road to Damascus.  They say he fell off his donkey, but thereafter it's evident that he just kept falling.  He suffered severe health problems with his eyes from that time forward.  This is possibly the "thorn in the flesh" that he applied the prayer of faith to for healing three times, only to have God point blank refuse to heal him!  His old friends became his new enemies.  Before the week was out he was running for his life.  He was despised, even by fellow Christians who resented his claim to apostleship and constantly attacked his ministry.  In 2 Corinthians 11:23-33 he gives a summary of his sufferings so far, which includes being beaten within an inch of his life (by legal definition of the time) five times, three less severe beatings, suffering a (barely) unsuccessful execution (we're not talking lethal injection--we're talking stoning), three shipwrecks, 48 hours on the open water, perils of every kind, cold, hunger, thirst, poverty, betrayal, stress...the list goes on and on!  But don't worry, it get's worse because after this letter Paul would be arrested and sent to the most infamously evil ruler in ancient history (Nero), in whose capital he would spend the rest of his days as a prisoner in increasingly deteriorating conditions until he was finally beheaded.  He never did get to see his dream of spreading the gospel to Spain come true (Romans 15:24-25, note that Paul was arrested in the middle of the Jerusalem trip mentioned in verse 25 and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner).  Paul's life was great in terms of material blessings, until he met Jesus converted, and started doing the sorts of things the prosperity gospel preachers tell us to do.  Thereafter it took a downward spiral ending in dank prison cells, isolation, betrayal, and gruesome death.
• The Disciples--It is worth noting that of the twelve Apostles chosen by Christ (eleven, if we discount Paul, Matthias, and Judas Iscariot), only one of them died of natural causes, and he lived out his remaining days in exile and isolation on a tiny Mediterranean island.  Unlike Paul, these men hadn't been huge successes before meeting Christ, but the meeting certainly didn't improve their material situation much.  Christ warned them that they would face tribulation, be cast out of their local congregations, hauled before judges, thrown in prisons, and killed by people who thought their death was commanded by God.  All of it came true.
• Jesus--Saving the best for last, there is Jesus Christ Himself.  God the Father loves us just as He loves Jesus.  Jesus was perfect, so we can be sure that anything that went wrong in His life was 100% not His fault as a result of faithlessness or failure to follow the gospel of wealth.  He was also, according to the Bible, tempted in every way that we are but did not sin.  Whatever is not of faith is sin--so if we can screw up the material blessings God wants for our lives by not pushing the right divine buttons, He had equal opportunity to do so but didn't.  Knowing this we should expect Jesus to have lived--in accordance with the prosperity gospel--a life of unparalleled opulence, abundant wealth, extraordinary health, and giddy happiness.  But if this is our portrait of Christ, we do not believe in the Jesus portrayed in the Bible.  In the Bible, Jesus was the poor son of a working-class couple who lost his father before he was thirty.  He grew up in the social and economic backwater of a country occupied by foreign powers.  He was not wealthy by any stretch.  He was not particularly good looking (Isaiah 53:2)...and this was before He began His ministry.  His ministry's start was marked by forty days of fasting in the wilderness, wherein He suffered extreme hunger and temptation from Satan himself.  Materially speaking, it went downhill from there.  Jesus discouraged one would-be-follower by telling him that even the birds and the foxes were wealthier than He was, because at least they had a place to spend the night (Matthew 8:20).  He suffered hunger, thirst, weariness, and feelings of being overwhelmed on his journeys.  He and His disciples pooled their resources into a single purse from which they gave money to the poor who constantly pressed in on them--but it was a bag with a hole in it named Judas, who apparently listed kleptomania among his more admirable qualities (some have proposed that the others just didn't notice because the amount of money the disciples commanded was so huge the skimming went unnoticed, but in the ancient world huge sums necessitate multiple purses for the practical reason that gold and silver have a property called mass, which tends to add up quickly in any significant amount--instead, it may be the at the opposite is true and they didn't notice because they ran out of money so quickly they couldn't tell if it was legitimately spent, given away, or snatched up by Judas).  While He did not seem to suffer any health problems that we know of, He was far from the happiest man in the world.  He was described as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" who is never expressly said to have laughed or smiled, but is said to have "wept" on multiple occasions.  His family thought He was crazy.  The crowds didn't know what to think of Him but followed Him everywhere as if He were giving out free candy.  He was run out of town multiple times, forever in trouble with the religious authorities, and was forced to escape mobs hungry for his blood on several occasions.  The culmination of His life and His self-declared mission from the Father was to be betrayed by a member of His inner circle, abandoned by all of his friends, dragged around town to be assaulted, insulted, and convicted for crimes He didn't commit, turned over to foreigners who mocked Him and beat Him so severely that He was no longer recognizable as human, handed over to a blood-thirsty mob, dragged out of town, subjected to the most public, painful, and horrific form of execution ever devised by man, cut off from the Father, and robbed of His sole earthly possessions--His clothes--by the men who executed Him.  And then He died.  In some versions, He went to Hell, but establishing that in Scripture is ticklish business.  Needless to say, He did not enjoy immense material blessings in this life.  In fact, His life is a portrait of unparalleled material destitution and suffering (especially considering that before coming to Earth He lived and reigned in Heaven of all places)--and He was doing everything right!

From the above, we can conclude that in the Bible the faithful do not enjoy material blessings as a result of pushing the right divine button combinations.  Often it seems that instead the more faithful a person is, the more they suffer materially as a result.  This does not align favorably with prosperity gospel.  If prosperity gospel is correct and it is God's sole or highest function to give us material blessings in this life as a reward for good behavior then there are, in my mind, only two ways to reconcile this with the plain fact that people--in the world today as in Scripture--do not materially benefit from obedience to God but rather often suffer material loss.  The first explanation is that God is, for some reason, unable to provide these blessings in the measure to which we are (in the language of prosperity gospel) "entitled" to them or in a timely manner.  The second is that He is personally able, but that other forces intervene to bring material suffering into our lives, overriding the blessings God gives.  In the first case, God would be incompetent, cripplingly incapable of discharging His duties as a result of His own faults.  In the second case, God is impotent, powerless against forces in the world and in our lives that are stronger than He is.  Neither case describes the God of the Bible.  Clearly, prosperity gospel cannot be worshiping Him!

Time, Water, and Priorities, Downstream

Yesterday I went hiking with my family to the waterfall here at Snow Mountain Ranch!  It was a really nice hike, but on our way up we discovered that the stream was swollen from snowmelt and the trail was muddy. Not far from the trailhead, we actually found a rivulet of water running down the trail.  We had to step to the side to avoid it and eventually chose to walk the back portion of the loop in order to keep out of the mud and water.  On the way back down, though, we tried the portion of trail we had not yet hiked.  What we found surprised me.  We knew there were beavers in the area and had seen several old, broken dams down by the trailhead.  But on our way back we passed a new dam, one which had been built halfway across the trail.  The beavers had choked off the swollen stream and diverted part of it (quite unintentionally) onto the walking trail.  This was the rivulet that we'd observed earlier, flowing down much of the length of the trail simply because upstream a ways a beaver had decided to build a dam partway across the path.  I was surprised to see how a seemingly insignificant collection of sticks lying halfway across the trail could create a hazard for so much of the rest of the trail.

Later, I was talking with my Dad.  Somehow we got onto the topic of time management and parental responsibility came up.  He mentioned how, at one point when he was a youth pastor, he'd realized he was spending more time with other people's children than with his own.  He knew it was a common problem.  Lots of times preacher's kids turn out rotten or leave the faith because their father is always too involved in other people's lives and spiritualities to take care of problems in his own home.  Judging from the Bible, this isn't unique to our own times.  My namesake, the brother of Moses, was the first High Priest of Israel, but his sons got out of hand and were killed for offering "strange fire" to God.  Eli the priest in the beginning of 1 Samuel similarly could not manage his children.  Samuel himself was not immune, since when the people demand a king one of their reasons is that Samuel's sons "do not walk in your ways" (1 Samuel 8:5).  David and Solomon are two godly fathers whose households were positively famous for their manageability.

It's an easy thing to do.  These days, as my Dad pointed out, people live to pursue their own dreams, most often.  While he didn't say there was anything wrong with that, certainly a lifestyle choice that puts one's own goals and desires ahead of anything else leaves no room or a spouse or children.  "If you're going to live that kind of life, it's unfair to invite anyone else into it: and that's what you do when you marry and have a family," he said.

Even if one puts apparently selfless interests first, the result can be the same.  I happened upon the blog of a young Christian leader recently.  He's married and just became a father, but the schedule he's posted for his day-to-day life (I don't know why he posted one, but he did) shows he's already a very busy man.  He works each day till almost 7 o'clock and spends every weekday evening in church activities, usually discipling other men.  Weekends he's similarly busy and reports the only significant chunk of time he has to be at home with his wife (other than morning Bible studies at 8) is on Sunday, when (of course) he has to attend church and afterward help her rush through uncompleted household chores, after which they're both apparently so exhausted all they can do is pop in a movie and veg out on the couch!  There's no doubt this man has good intentions.  Every moment of his time is dedicated to church, God, and building into the lives of other men.  But what about his decision to spend comparatively little time romancing his wife and maintaining their relationship, which is to be a picture of the union between Christ and the Church, in the flesh?  In his latest post, his daughter has been born (quite a miraculous gift from God), and while he acknowledges that she is now his God-given responsibility, he's also noted that she's become a disruption to his times of prayer and Bible-reading.  "The best way to love her is to keep pursuing Christ and His love for me," he writes.  But will that mean that keeping up with his meetings with other men and their families will take priority over raising his daughter to love God and do what's right?  Will she suffer great harm for the sake of a little good built into the lives of strangers?  Will their marriage suffer?  Only time will tell.  It seems a little sacrifice now, just a few branches in the path, easily stepped over, but downstream it might have unforeseen consequences, making the whole trail impassible with mud and water.

This is why my father, when he saw he was more involved with other children than his own, took a step back from the ministry (he didn't leave it, but he made sure his priority was at home).  Perhaps this is also why the Bible explicitly states that no man should be made an elder unless he manages his household well and has godly children.  Otherwise the temptation to think his real job is outside the home might be too great, leaving his children practically fatherless and his wife a lonely married woman (which ought to be a contradiction in terms).

I'm glad my father made the decisions he did.  Now, as he was just telling us, his coworkers praise him for his children, so well-behaved and accomplished: all of them college graduates, godly Christians, and intelligent people (I'm a novelist and my sisters are both in physics...am I adopted?  Haha!).  Much good has come from his decision to step back and re-prioritize.  I know intellectually that when I start a family of my own my priorities need to be similar: reflecting that my real job is not my 9 to 5 shift or my fantasy series, but my family.  I only hope God helps me make the decision practically as well as intellectually when the time comes, and that in the meantime He'll help me keep my priorities straight as a single man, for I cannot know what fruit they'll bear downstream...

Hope of the Hopeless

For a couple people out there, that I know of, it's midnight no matter what the hour may be: it is a midnight of the soul.  These people have set their hope on something, some goal, some love, some reconciliation, some coming-together.  But looking from the outside, from the world's perspective, these people hope in something impossible: the goal cannot be achieved, the love is irretrievably lost, the parties cannot be reconciled, the things that must be brought together are like repelling magnets that can never be made to touch.  In other words, these people are idiots.

To me, though, they are the noblest of idiots, who in their unshakably stupid refusal to realize when it's time to let go show that they know something more than the greatest philosophers and geniuses of our age.  They know that some things are worth holding on to.  They are the wisest, then, of all, for they know the true value of what we discard and give up as lost.

These noble, wisest idiots are not alone.  They come from a long and proud line.  All of mankind's greatest stories feature at least one of such person.



Further, there is a name for this brand of terrifically wise lunacy.  It is called faith.  "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," says the Bible in Hebrews 11:1.  Thereafter, it lists off the people who had this kind of faith, this hopless hope.  There was Abel who hoped to please the  God who made all things when all he had to offer was a lamb.  There was Enoch who hoped to be in the presense of the God whose face no one can see and live without facing the death that comes to all mankind.  There was Noah who prepared for a truly apocalyptic rainstorm on a world where rain had never before fallen.  There was Abraham who wandered as a stranger in a land God had promised to give to him and his descendents, and never possessed any more (nor did his descendents, for several hundred years after him) of it than a small plot on which to bury his dead.  There was his wife, Sarah: a woman who was barren even in her younger days and yet hoped for a son well past the onset of menopause.  When she finally did have this son, Abraham, in obedience to the voice of God, prepared to kill his son in ritual sacrifice, hoping that somehow God would still provide heirs through the son he was about to slay.  There was that same son, Isaac, as an old man with no lands or noteworthy possessions who hoped his two sons would inherit great kingdoms and blessed them accordingly.  Then there was one of those sons, Jacob, who hoped the same of his offspring, even though they lived as strangers in a foreign land that would later enslave them.  And one of his sons, not to be beaten, hoped to be buried in a land neither he nor several generations of his descendants would ever be able to visit, much less possess.  Then there was another family, who gave birth to Moses and hoped to give their child a good life, though the government hunted him to kill him from the moment he was born.  Then Moses himself hoped doubly for two impossible things: to have a life better than that of a prince of Egypt by forsaking the title and living as one among many slaves, and to find a way to free an oppressed people from the most powerful dictatorship of the time by wandering around in the desert tending goats.  When he led these people, they all had such impossible hopes: they hoped that some unseen power would decimate the populace of the most advanced civilization of their time--and yet somehow spare them because of a little blood on their doorways--, and also hoped that they could cross an impassible body of water on foot in order to escape a pursuing army.  Their leader Joshua hoped to demolish the walls of one of the most heavily fortified cities in ancient Palestine by parading silently around them for a week.  One of the inhabitants of that same city, Rahab, hoped that somehow this plan would succeed and that she would somehow survive the ensuing ethnic clensing--and not get killed by her own people as a traitor in the meantime.  There is a truly great crowd of people who have come before us and held on to hopeless hopes.

If we are Christians, we stand among them, for the Bible says that this hopeless hope is the very same faith that saves all who profess the name of Christ: "For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience" (Romans 8:24-25).  Jesus Christ Himself had this hope.  He hoped to save condemned sinners from their just punishment at the hands of an omnipotent Judge.  He hoped to love and be loved forever by the enemies who hated and killed Him.  I confess that I myself am one of these people: I hope to be reconciled with one who has disdained to speak to me, I hope for the love of a woman who literally has not spoken to me in a year, and I hope to see fulfilled promises made to both her and me through a situation that looks tailor-made for breaking both the promises and those of us foolish enough hold on to them--and these are the temporal things I hope for, the eternal things I hope for are so wild I dare not confess them here...but I hope for them.

The great thing about our God is that He is a God of those who step out or stand strong in faith--of all those who hold to hopeless hope in His name.  He never leads them astray, He never lets them down, and He is proud of them.  He rewards their hopeless hope with impossible solutions.  He gave Abel His pleasure.  He took up Enoch without death.  He saved Noah and his family by the flood.  He gave the land to Abraham and his descendants, and they possess it to this day.  He gave Sarah a son, so that he might have descendants at all.  He sent an angel to stay Abraham's knife at the last possible moment.  He fulfilled the blessings Isaac gave Esau and Jacob, and made great nations of both of them.  He fulfilled the blessings of Jacob to his sons by making them the twelve tribes of Israel.  He saw to it that Joseph was buried in the Promised Land.  He gave Moses a name and a reward greater than that of any prince of Egypt.  He also gave him direction and purpose from a miraculous meeting in the trackless wilderness.  He killed all the firstborn of Egypt, but spared every household that had kept the Passover.  He parted the Red Sea, and drowned the army in it when they tried to follow.  He brought down the walls of Jericho.  He preserved Rahab and immortalized her in the genealogy of the kings of Israel, and of Christ Himself (Matthew 1:5).  He made salvation available in Jesus Christ.  He drew men and women from all races and all walks of life to give their hearts to Christ forever.  He raised Christ from the dead and in the future shall conquer death itself forever.  Our God is the hope of the hopeless, and I am proud to be one of His.

What Jesus Asked for Us

Toward the end of John chapter 17 there's a section that's very special to me.  John 17 is one of Christ's last prayers before His death.  It's called the high-priestly prayer because unlike His other prayers in Gethsemane, this one is intercessory.  He is not praying mostly for Himself, but mostly for His followers.  Much of the prayer focuses on His disciples, the Twelve (well, eleven at this point, Judas having left and Christ knowing why).  But at the end of this prayer, in verses 20-26, He includes a prayer for us today.

"I do not ask for these only [the disciples], but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.  Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.  O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me.  I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."

This is the only time in scripture I can think of where Christ speaks  directly about us today.  I think it is very significant what He says here and what He asks for us.  His prayer is first and foremost for us to have unity.  This unity is to be His sign: a sign to the world that the Father has sent Him and that the Father loves us as He loves Christ Himself.  To give us this unity, He has given us His own glory, the very glory that the Father gave to Him.  He also makes known to us God's name and character, so that we may be unified with Him and filled with His love.  Christ's desire here for us is that we all be unified with each other in a unity based on experiencing the love of God and unity with God as individuals, and receiving His glory individually as well as collectively.

It's also worth noting what Christ doesn't ask for us here.  He does not ask for a unity based on conformity or complete agreement on all issues.  The early church did not have such a unity, nor did it aspire to it.  Paul records in Romans 14 how Christian practices and beliefs differed from individual to individual (One believes he may eat anything, another is vegetarian; one observes holidays, another does not), and how Christians were to respect one another's beliefs out of love rather than trying to enforce universal agreement on non-essential doctrines and practices.  He also doesn't ask for unity based on blind obedience to a leader.  No leader is named in the passage, and even if there were the unity of the church is to mirror the unity of the Trinity.  Christ certainly felt free to question the Father's plans for Him in Gethsemane--asking the Father three times to call off the crucifixion: the whole purpose for Christ coming to Earth--, though He ultimately obeyed them.

There's also other things Christ doesn't ask for.  Christ doesn't ask for the Father's blessing on a moralizing crusade and culture war.  He does not call upon the Father's aid in social activism campaigns.  Christ doesn't even ask anything regarding evangelism.  Though it's tempting as an evangelical (which I am) to consider soul-winning the ultimate goal and high calling of all Christians, it is not so.  Neither is winning the culture war (or fighting it) or engaging in social activism.  If these were Christ's highest aspirations for us, He would have made mention of it here, but He doesn't.  Instead, He focuses  His prayer on relationships within the church, rather than without...and this is a place where some churches are sadly lacking.

God's Best

I read the introduction to an essay on leadership someone linked to this morning, alleging that in it the writer claimed to be a modern-day apostle.  Whether such a claim is made or not or whether or not (if made) it is true ("apostle" does just mean one who is sent, so it might equate to our missionaries--though obviously no one today could claim to be one of the Twelve) I don't yet know.  I haven't read that far, to be honest.  Maybe when I do I'll talk about it and post a link here to the original article.

What I did read in the introduction already had me bothered.  The below quote is just over 200 words, so my time at a publishing house tells me that it falls under fair use:

Israel could be spiritually lazy with a king. Without a king they all had to look up, even in recognizing the prophets or judges (leaders) for their time. With a kingship there is automatic lineage. Automatically the elders [sic] son is next in line to rule, control, and direct. Without the kingship plan each individual could be chosen for leadership. Anyone could be a Gideon found grinding out his grain when the Lord called him for action. Each man had to voluntarily follow into the battles. Under a king you were conscripted. Under the kingship program man was king when God was to be looked on as King alone. God wanted the fuller part. Not only is that more glorifying to Him, but it is more advantageous for all the people. But the people wanted to be more like the heathen around them. How sad, but of course God in His love still did great things in that situation.

We do not need to belabor the point. God still worked with kings in the Old Testament (O.T.), but it was not His best plan.

Israel had many years before they evolved into certain patterns that were not God's best. Like Israel, God's people in the Church Age have moved in similar ways.

--Leadership: Elders and Apostles by Jim McCotter and Dennis Clark 

To start with, there's some historical inaccuracy in this.  First of all, Israel doesn't seem to have lived well with "spiritual laziness" at any point in their history--whether in the book of Judges or the books of Kings, forsaking the Lord tended to end rather badly for them (not that that ever stopped them from doing it).  Second, the eldest son did not "automatically" ascend to the throne after his father.  The Old Testament records numerous disputed successions and even several outright coups.  The son to ascend to the throne was not always the eldest either, as with Solomon's succession (he was actually a fairly late-comer to David's enormous family, though he was the oldest living son of Bathsheba and David).

But laying that aside, there's the bigger issue of God's best.  That one applies to us today.  Here, the writer asserts plainly that the monarchy was "not God's best" for Israel.  It was "not His best plan," though "God in His love still did great things in that situation."  Israel started out in the center of God's A-Plan, it seems, but they decided to scrap it, get themselves a king, and wound up stuck with God's second-best fallback plan for the rest their nation's independent existence.  Poor Israel.

Poor us.  The writer's transition makes it clear he thinks Israel isn't the only one capable of doing this, nor non-Christians.  The elect, "God's people," can, "like Israel," move away from God's best.  We, collectively and as individuals, can miss out on God's plan for our lives and wind up stuck in some muddle of whatever He "in His love" can work in that situation (which, while it might be "great" will not be "God's best").

Think about this for a minute, because if it's true, it's frightening.  God has a plan for your life.  That's clear and Biblical.  "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" (Psalm 139:16).  But if you screw up, you could wind up not living even one of them.  You could wind up stuck in some sub-prime life, like a homeowner paying an "underwater" mortgage on a home that's no longer worth what they got it for.  God will still love you.  God will still do good--maybe even great--things through you and for you.  But God's A-Plan for your life?  That's gone.  You threw off His plan and now all that is lost and you're stuck with second-best blessings, like Esau coming back to find Jacob stole his firstborn birthright.  Hopefully, there's something tossed in to the end of Plan-B that let's you get back to Plan A again, or you're screwed for life, sucker--and so am I.

I mean, what would it take to throw off God's A-Plan?  Apparently not much.  Israel managed to do it just by organizing a monarchy, like those of their neighbors.  God directed the appointment of the king and all, but God's A-Plan was blown from the moment they decided they needed a king.  Who knows what "God's people" in the "Church Age" have done to screw ourselves over.  What about Adam and Eve?  All they did was take a bite from the wrong tree and--BLAM--there goes God's best for all Creation (you seriously didn't think the Fall was God's Plan-A, did you?).  And since you and I sin in ways greater and lesser than Israel and Eve every single day...yep, we're probably down to the triple Z plan by now.  I know I certainly must be.

If, that is, we can move away from God's best for our lives.

Consider it from God's eternal perspective.  Look back at some of the language in the above paragraphs.  If this is true, if God's best--God's plans--can be derailed by simple decisions from our end, God is in a heap of trouble.  We all sin.  We all make mistakes.  We commit these things by the bucketload, and there are over 7 billion of us on Earth right now, doing nothing but throwing God's plans into utter chaos.  God must have a list of back-up plans long enough to circle the universe--twice--just in order to keep up with our shenanigans.  He must just barely be in control: struggling to steer us all for good while we constantly tug the wheel and nudge the car on to ever bumpier back roads (and into occasional trees).

The problem is that this doesn't seem to be the God of the Bible.  If there's one thing that seems to define God in the Bible, it is that He is in charge.  He is God!  How many times does He say that, in the book of Isaiah alone?  I don't know that I could count them.  What does the Bible say is capable of deferring or derailing God's plans?  Nothing.  The Bible says such an occurrence is strictly impossible.  "Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases" (Psalm 115:3).  "Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps" (Psalm 135:6).  Indeed, to prevent Him from doing so, one would have to be greater than Him.  But no one is.  No one can stand against Him.  "The Lord of hosts has sworn:  'As I have planned, so shall it be, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand,...'  For the Lord of hosts has purposed, and who will annul it? His hand is stretched out, and who will turn it back?" (Isaiah 14:24-27).  Perhaps if we think our name is on a list that answers those last two questions, then we can worry about ruining God's plans for our lives.

Some may say at this point, "Well, yes, that is God.  He is all-sovereign and all that.  But you see, God gives us free-will.  Of our own free-will, we can sin and leave what He's planned for us.  We aren't greater than Him, of course, but He gives us free-will enough to upset His plans."  It makes for a nice theological argument, perhaps, but it still isn't Biblical.  The Bible does treat man as a creature with free-will (as he is held responsible for what he does), but at the same time it pointedly includes all mankind in being under the absolute, unbreakable sovereignty of God.  "The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps" (Proverbs 16:9).  "The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord" (Proverbs 16:33--for all us gamers).  "Many are the plans in a man's heart, but the council of the Lord will be established" (Proverbs 19:21).  "Man's steps are ordained by the Lord; how then can man understand his way?" (Proverbs 20:24).  "The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He wishes" (Proverbs 21:1).  Even evil deeds and people are not excepted.  The Lord intends Joseph's brother's evil actions for good (Genesis 50:20).  The Assyrian kings murder, slaughter, and conquer, boosting themselves in their prowess and the power of their gods--but the God of Israel says their boasting is absurd: they are like an ax in His hand and it is He who has ordained their bloody conquest (Isaiah 10:15).  Even Satan, in all his evil and rebellion, must ask God's permission to cause havoc (Job 1:12 and 2:6).

Certainly, the God of the Bible is in control.  He does not have a list of contingencies He has to keep striking off as we shoot down His favorite plans with our sinful antics.  He has one plan.  That is the plan, and unless we think we can arm-wrestle Him and win, that is the plan that is going to come about and is coming about even now.  The only question then, is does this divine plan represent "God's best?"  In answer, I pose another question: is there any conceivable reason why it would not be God's best?  Given what we know about the sovereignty of God and His love for us, He has absolutely no need to pick a second-best plan, no need to settle for anything.  He can do (will do, and has done) exactly as He pleases, whatever He pleases, and He loves us literally more than life itself (more than His life--which is saying something: as God, His life is awesome).  Does that really look like the bio of somebody who's going to settle for a so-so plan for your life?  He's God.  He doesn't want to settle, and He doesn't have to either.  Why should He?  So, if He has a plan for our lives, you can bet it is His best: His A-Plan.  And if He is the sovereign God the Bible declares Him to be, then you can bet that, no matter how many mistake's you've made, that plan is still in effect, still unfolding in your life, and hasn't even skipped a beat.

That's not to say, of course, that God has to relish every moment of His A-Plan.  Jesus clearly did not look forward to dying on the cross, but God planned this from the very beginning, even foretelling it right after the Fall (Genesis 3:15).  God is "not wishing that any should perish," but in the end He will cast into Hell "everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life" (2 Peter 3:9 and Revelation 13:8).  Let's be clear about one thing: not every moment of God's best is going to feel best--not for you, not for God.  Not every moment of the best parenting, the best marriage, or even the best food is pure bliss either--and I think it's intentionally that way.  God could have made a plan where every moment would have been sunshine and roses for everybody, but He didn't.  He made a plan where everybody got hurt at one point or another.  Yet He still made the best plan, and none of the hurts change that or shake His control.

I think, if we realize this--if I realize this--it will change the way we look at life and at ourselves.  If God truly is in control and truly is good and truly loves us (choose: "D, all of the above"), then His plan has already accounted for all of our mistakes, all of our sins, all of the just plain weird and stupid things about us we think couldn't possibly factor in to God's plan in any constructive manner: God has planned for them all, and they are all included in His best (He could have designed your life without any of these things, He could have prevented you from making any given mistake or committing any given sin: He chose not to).  Yes, our sins are still black, our suffering is still real.  So is the suffering of Christ.  But the stars shine best in the deepest darkness, and so also I think the brilliance of God's best is that He sets the glories of our lives and indeed of all Creation in the midst of inky blackness.  It is all a part of God's best for us.  Even our sins, God turns about in His plan to bring good into our lives.  Remember how the Israelites rejected God's direct rule over them and wanted a monarchy just like everybody else (1 Samuel 8:7)?  God used that to bring David to the throne, and Solomon, his son, by which the Israelites knew a prosperity they'd never imagined.  And God loved it.  He established David's line forever (1 Chronicles 17:2) and used it to bring Christ into the world, the ultimate heir of the throne of David.  If Israel had really drifted from "God's best" when they made that decision, you'd think He'd correct it at some point instead of etching it in stone as a part of the plan He'd made before He began Creation.  The truth is, they didn't.  God didn't like their rejection, but He knew it was coming, He'd allowed it to enter the picture, and He'd planned accordingly so that even Israel's rejection played right into His hand.

Applied to my own life, this is an immense comfort to me.  Satan is the accuser, and while Jesus came so that we could share in His joy, and have it to the full (John 15:11), Satan is the thief who comes in to steal and destroy that joy.  When I sin, he is waiting with a laundry-list of accusations.  At the top of that list is this: "You idiot, you just blew God's plan for your life.  Now you're stuck with second-best.  You'll never have what He promised now."  But God is true, and God is sovereign.  His best stands, and I can withstand the Devil with that.  Even when I haven't sinned, I sometimes feel like my life is on the fast track to nowhere.  I'm a college graduate here, living with my folks and working as a cashier.  Really?  Where's the house and the big-bucks career I was supposed to have by now?  What about the mission to deepest-darkest Africa that I was supposed to lead?  Shouldn't I at least be heading back from a Summer Infusion to a semester spent with my small group at church?  Did I miss a turn somewhere?  Have I stepped away from God's best?  Satan would step up in a heartbeat and answer yes, anything to throw me off, get me down, and discourage me in my relationship with God.  But God is sovereign even here, in my old room at home, on my day off from standing behind a register, and He has a plan for my life--which is unfolding even now--and it is the best.  This is God's best, and I will be able to see it as such in time, when everything has unfolded and the full skein of God's work appears in all its glory.  I can rest in that.  I can set my seal to that.  God is true, faithful, good, and in control, and this is His best.  I can enjoy that!

I hope you can, too.

Religion is a Lie

That was the catch-phrase around a youth group I used to go to.  It may seem strange at first, to the uninitiated, but the motto of that group was that they weren't there to do religion but to have a relationship with Christ.  Viewed that way, it makes sense.  Religion is something that Pharisees or Mormons or other people who don't know Jesus but follow a lot of rules to make it up to God do--but us, we know Jesus and have a relationship with Him!

Really?

I have had to ask myself that, starting a month or so back when the fire came down the mountain into Colorado Springs.  That fire was an act of God--just ask any insurance company.  The Bible backs them up, in fact, telling us that God is the cause not only of prosperity but also of ruin.  This isn't what I learned in church though.  In church, Jesus was all sappy smiles, cuddling children, and delivering theological discourses on the nature of the Trinity.  He wasn't the sort of person you'd think capable of creating roiling thunderclouds and veiling half the sky in rolling smoke while his fire ripped down the side of a mountain.  God simply didn't do that sort of thing.  He was too polite, and besides that he was only supposed to come out on Sunday mornings and during Bible studies.  If I've heard it once I've heard it a thousand times, a Christian is never supposed to be afraid of God...all those "fear God" verses only mean we're supposed to respect him because he's high and holy and all that, but never terrifying.  But seeing smoke cover up the sky and black clouds roll overhead filled with hail and lightning--that's terrifying, and if the Bible is true, that's also God.

Do I really know this God?  Do you?  If we don't, do we know the real God at all, because I assure you, those flames were real.  The thunderclouds that darken the sky every afternoon now around here are real.  If the God we know is only real when we show up for Bible study or quiet time or worship on Sunday, he's not really real at all and he's not much use to us either.

I picked up John Eldredge's latest book a few days ago.  It's called Beautiful Outlaw and it's all about Jesus, parts of Jesus we never saw before.  For instance, did you know that Jesus had a sense of humor?  Oh, I'm sure someone has said it to you before, "God must have a sense of humor because of thus and so," but did you really believe it.  I doubted it.  I mean, can you really picture the pale, gentle, mild Jesus of so many religious paintings pulling a prank on someone?  But how else can we explain what happened on the Emmaus road.  Here are two disciples, grief-stricken and confused, plodding along the dusty path and Jesus meets them.  Only He doesn't let them know it's Him.  He walks with them for hours, feigning ignorance of what's just happened in Jerusalem, going through passages of scripture, and then He pretends He's going to go on.  They beg Him to stay the night, He consents, and the moment they realize it's Him--Poof!  Gotcha!  He's outta there!  It's hilarious in retrospect.  The two of them totally got punked!  The problem is I never read it that way.  I was always too busy looking for some deeper meaning.  I've never heard of any reading that found any humor in the situation at all, come to think about it, nor one that commented on the cleverness of Jesus as he pulled the wool over these two guys' eyes only to reveal Himself at the last second.  But isn't that how the story reads?  How it really goes?  Why then, when we read it, do we approach it with our somber Sunday faces on.  Seriously, the God who invented squirrels and gave them an insane urge to chase each other up, down, and sideways around trees came to Earth in the flesh and we don't think He ever once pulled a practical joke?  I'm sorry to say it, but picturing God with a mischievous gleam in His eye is difficult, even more difficult than seeing Him as fierce.  It's just not something that ever seems to come up at church.

All of this makes me question how much of what I know of God and interact with Him is religion and how much is relationship.  Consider a typical prayer: "Dear Jesus, Thank you for this day that you've given us.  Thank you for bringing us together.  Please help us to [insert request here].  In Jesus' name, Amen."  I mean, really, what does any of that mean?  Do I talk to my friends like that?  My father?  The Bible directs us to call out to God using terms that Aramaic children used to address their daddy's.  Can you imagine one of them going up to their father and uttering some formulaic request phrased like some messed-up verbal letter?  Does that sound like relationship or religion to you?

Beautiful Outlaw is basically a book about how religion lies about and distorts who Jesus is, interfering with our relationship with Him.  Eldredge argues that religion isn't just a lie when its done by Pharisees or Mormons, or Catholics, or people from some denomination we don't like--it's also a lie when it's done by us, and here's a list of times and places from the book where we can identify it at work.

• When loving Jesus is considered optional
• When knowing about God replaces knowing God: "Members can explain to you theories of atonement, or seven steps to success, but can't name one intimate encounter they've had with Jesus."
• Power displays are confused for intimacy with Jesus: "Do people chase the next miracle, or do they chase Jesus?"
• Religious activity is confused with commitment to Christ: "To draw near to God requires a church function of some kind.  Church activities are considered more important than any other type of activity.  Those who do not engage regularly in religious gatherings are suspect."
• Christian service substitutes for friendship with Jesus

Let's stop right there.  My experience is this is those last two are big in the modern church, especially in its youth ministries.  In my college ministry I regularly had people beat themselves black and blue with guilt because they missed a meeting or had to leave early for homework.  It was thought that missing Bible study because you had a midterm in the morning meant you were putting schoolwork above God.  But really, if you're not doing the schoolwork for God what's the point of it?  Why are you doing it anyway?  And if you are doing it for God is it better to serve Him privately in your work or to go publicly to a meeting where everyone can praise your piousness for being there in spite of the test you have in the morning?  I think Jesus addressed this question when he said that it was better to pray in your closet where no one would know than to sound a trumpet and proclaim your supplications from the streetcorner.

There are other things too, related to this.  Who are the "spiritually mature" people in your youth group or ministry?  Wouldn't everyone say they're the one's who are most involved?  The leaders, the people who show up early to set up and stay late to tear down?  Now maybe those people legitimately are the people most committed to Christ, but let's be honest, don't we see it the other way around?  "That person leads a Bible study, attends three small groups, has two quiet times a day, disciples six women, and bakes snacks for everyone after the service--ergo she must be a committed Christian!"  Really?  Does it actually mean that, or is this perhaps just the portrait of a really busy woman who might actually be to busy for a relationship with God (I'll tell you one thing, she's certainly too busy for a relationship with a man)?  And what about the delinquents of our groups?  Are they people who legitimately don't know God, or do we lump into that category anybody who's only marginally committed to our particular group.  Maybe their waffling between two campus ministries.  My goodness they must be a heretic!  We can tell without even looking into their daily life and relationship with Christ, of course: we know because they're not totally committed to seeing our little corner of the religious kingdom grow and prosper--and that's all God really cares about, right?  That's religion.

• Holiness is substituted with rule-keeping
• A trivial morality prevails

Eldredge uses an enlightening example of the former.  Consider a stop sign in an empty parking lot at 2AM.  Do you run it or stop?  The purpose of the stop sign is to protect life and property.  That's the spirit of the law.  There's no one and nothing around.  All is protected.  The spirit of the law is in no danger here.  Are you compelled to keep the letter of it as well?  Jesus certainly didn't feel so when it came to the Sabbath day.  He was absolutely famous for breaking the letter of that law, while preserving its spirit.

Which brings us to the next point.  The Jews were more upset about Jesus violating the Sabbath then they were about there being demoniacs in their congregation.  What about us?  Which would upset us more: a girl who walks into church in cut-offs and tattoos dropping F-bombs (at things which, let's be honest, are best described by F-bombs), or a well-dressed woman who comes to church every Sunday with the best of manners and just can't stop telling other people about the things the woman she disciples has told her in confidence--with the result being that the woman she disciples suffers relational fallout with several of her closest friends and small group?  My guess is that we'd be most offended at the former.  That girl would be lucky to last an hour in most churches.  The woman--she'd be right at the heart of the church until she died or it did, and it wouldn't matter how many people's lives she'd crushed with her gossip.  Is that not trivial--to strain at appearances and swallow a strifemonger who turns brother against brother?  I know one church I attended was so trivial.  There to have feelings for another human being was a more serious offence than to betray a secret and sever close friends (Proverbs 17:9).  The former was called lust and treated with severity.  The latter was called love and was lauded.  Jesus would have been disgusted.  And what about drinking and smoking?  My mother is a teetotalist, bless her heart, but Jesus' first miracle was to supernaturally bring a keg of the best stuff in town to a wedding that had run dry.  But in our churches today, any mention of alcohol brings ire from the congregationalists.  Many will defend their anti-alcohol stance from the Bible.  Others will say that God hates booze because it's not taking care of our body's properly.  Usually, they will say this around a doughnut they are shoving into their frame that's already a hundred pounds heavier than it ought to be.  Seriously, when was the last time anybody in church ever talked about gluttony?  Apparently we're too busy indulging it (which the Bible does condemn), but thank God we don't smoke (which the Bible doesn't even mention).  Is this not a trivial morality based entirely on rule-keeping?  Is this not religion?

• The system operates on the fear of man

While we're thinking about morality in our churches (or perhaps the lack of it, as the case may be) let's look at what's behind it.  Really, why do we do the things we do?  Why am I tempted to go back and delete some of that last paragraph?  I may have been harsh, too harsh.  I want to go back so I don't upset anyone.  Really?  Was Jesus concerned with upsetting people?  Gee, I better not heal this guy on the Sabbath, the Jew's got pretty upset the last time I did that and I don't want to offend anybody.  The very idea that they would be upset by it was infuriating to Him--it's one of the few times the Bible says He got angry.  Frankly God doesn't seem to give a darn who He upsets in the process of being Himself and doing good.  We do.  What's our problem?  We don't get this from a relationship with Him, we get it from a religion of fearing man.

One of the youth ministries I was a part of were experts at this.  They were clannish to a fault.  If someone stopped attending their group for any reason, they simply never saw or spoke with their old friends again.  If someone came in who didn't meet their expectations, he got a fairly effective cold shoulder.  If someone walked to the beat of a different drummer in their personal lives and relationships, peers would come down on them and hammer them with pressure until they mended their ways (even if their ways weren't out of line with scripture to begin with).  If someone was debating an important decision, they wouldn't take some time alone to pray about it, they'd go to their peers who would tell them what to do.  I can't name how many times someone from that group said they were going to this conference or that retreat because so-and-so told them to.  And what did God say about these plans?  I don't think most of them knew.  When God did show up and make His opinion known (you can't altogether keep Him out), He was overruled.  As one of the pastors told me, the will of God is most accurately determined by what your peers think.  Following His actual voice and trusting Him alone will only ruin your life.  Your best bet is to follow the system and do what your peers tell you.  Really?  Is that the voice of a man who has a close relationship with Christ and knows religion is a lie or a man who says "religion is a lie" with his mouth but with his life says religion is true and the relationship is a lie?  You be the judge!  A friend of mine was more distressed that his leader had expressed concern at his tardiness to an event than he was that God was upset at his ongoing addictions to pornography and lust (come to think of it, I never heard about the leader being upset about those things at all--just about being late to worship: can anybody say "trivial morality?").

Whom do we really fear here: God or man?  Whom do we follow: the Spirit or our peers?  Whom do we worship: God, or our religious institution?  I'm sad to say that--although a lot of people in that ministry did love Jesus--overall more love and devotion was lavished on the religious institution than on a relationship with our Savior.  In fact, some of them will be more upset that I attacked their little religious corner of the world than they will be that I shone a candle on aspects of a the personality of God very few Christians know about yet (earlier in this post).  They would rather I kept my mouth shut about the former and went on about the latter--because not knowing Jesus isn't a problem, not having religion is.  I know this will be their gut reaction because the last time I posted something about their group--wherein I simply quoted a statement from their religious leadership admitting that they had some problems to work out (which mysteriously had not been worked out yet or even addressed, 21 years later)--I received more than one response from someone who was more upset that I'd sullied the good name of their church than by the fact that their church (according to the written confession of one of their own leaders) was guilty as charged.  In fact no one presently attending that church or its affiliates seemed the least upset that their religious community had suffered the same admitted problems for a generation--they just wanted me to stop talking about it.  Seriously, people?  Which is worse: that I pointed it out, or that I was right?  Would you rather I'd allowed the hypocrisy to go on in secret for another 21 years and said nothing about what I knew and what I'd found?  Jesus never had any problem exposing hypocrites for what they were, but you're afraid I'll offend somebody!?  Whom do you really serve, then: God or man?  You'll fear whom you serve, and you'll serve whom you fear.

• False humility is honored
• There is safety in distance

We're good at this as Christians.  I know I certainly am.  If someone points out a mistake I've made, I'll say "sorry" a dozen times before they can get me to shut up.  If someone pays me a compliment I'm speechless.  I stammer lame excuses for why they shouldn't compliment me at all.  Really, how hard is it to say, "Thank you?"  We're very good at saying we're sooo unworthy--but we still manage too look down our noses at people less fortunate than ourselves.  And when it comes to God, what's our interaction with Him?  What do we call Him?  Are our prayers like that example I gave earlier: stiff formal things that have more in common with telegram messages meant to cross an ocean and greet a business partner than conversational dialogue with a trusted, intimate friend? Let's be honest with ourselves: what's the real end of our self-deprecation and reverential displays toward God?  If we really see ourselves as untouchably low and God as unreachably high then we're not living the gospel.  We were sinners, we were low, but God came in the flesh, as one of us "base worms" to touch the untouchables and make beautiful princes and princesses out of filth and mire.  Do we really want to tell Him His mission was a failure?  Do we really want to try to work counter to the incarnation and put God back up in the unreachable heavens--when He has expressed the intent to come dwell in our hearts?  Or is there something different at work?  I mean, personally, if I'm a worm, than I guess it's okay for me to act like one. And if God's up in the heavens, high and utterly out of touch with my minute-to-minute daily existence--well then he's far too busy being holy and unapproachable to interfere with me running my own life.  So are we really displaying humility and reverence, or do we just want God to go back where He came from so we can rule over our own lives?  If it's the latter, it's religion, because it certainly isn't a relationship with Jesus.

I imagine by now I've stepped on a few toes and upset a number of people.  I know I was among them.  The question I guess is what we're going to do about it.  When we see aspects of God's character that are clearly real but with which we have no experience, are we going to embrace them and explore them in our relationship with Him or write them off because they threaten our religious image of Him?  When we see religious nonsense and hypocrisy in our own lives and churches (Jesus said to beware the yeast of the Pharisees--do we really think that warning lost significance with the passing of that religious subgroup?) are we going to investigate it and scrub it from our hearts so we can have a freer clearer relationship with God, or are we going to whitewash it so that we don't have to leave our religious comfort zones?  When it comes right down to it, will we live out our statement that religion is a lie, or is it really our relationship that's a fraud?

May I Be Such a Man!

This morning, there was the story of two men in the Aurora theater shooting who literally laid down their lives to save their girlfriends, shielding them from the bullets with their own bodies.  Watch the video here.  You won't regret it.

The Bible says this of how a man is to treat his wife, down to his final breath:

"Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her..." (Ephesians 5:25)

Now Christ perfectly loves His bride, the Church, at all times, but it is interesting that Paul chose this moment as the example of Christ's love--the moment when Christ died for his Bride.  That is the moment those two young men dramatized for us with their final breaths.

In a society where our marriages are predominantly crumbling temporary matters and many of our men are checking out and walking away from their lives, those two men shine like beacons.  They weren't even married, but they lived out the vows so many men take at marriage and break at their convenience--the only way those two men were going to leave their lover's side was in a box.  And that's exactly what they did.

If you're married, or have been, or plan to be, would you have done the same for your lover?  Would you press her down to the safety of the floor and whisper, "Shh, stay down.  It's okay.  Shh, just stay down," even as rounds ripped into your back and your lifeblood began to pool beneath you?  If not, let me say this: you are not a man.  You are a dishonor, though you may yet change that and be a man like these.  In those fatal seconds, they earned more glory than Alexander the Great in all his battles, more honor than King Solomon held in his court, and demonstrated an integrity more valuable than the net worth of Bill Gates.  In eternity, we may scarce remember the names of the world's great kings, conquerors, and wealthy men, but we will remember the names of these men.

My grandfathers were such men.  On my mother's side, there's Kenneth Houston.  He met his bride as a pen pal during World War II as he served in the merchant marines.  He came home and courted her briefly, then married her and stayed married to her through thick and thin until she died suddenly in her 80's.  One year later, cancer took him as well, setting on him suddenly as if--with her life now over--it was simply time for him to die as well.  Yet to his last breath, he demonstrated love.  When his children gathered to figure out who would take care of him for his final days, he chose his son Ray, whom earlier had been estranged to him.  If there was any bitterness or healing yet to be done between them, he was determined to do it.  In the end, he lost his voice and was bedridden and mute.  Yet the last thing anyone remembers him doing is taking the hands of two of his children in his own and joining them together--as if to order them to carry on, to love and care for each other in his immanent absence.  Then he fell asleep and never woke up again in this world. Now there was a man!  May the halls of Heaven beware his coming!

On my father's side was my paternal grandmother's final husband, Bill Alder.  She had been married to many different men in her life, some good and some bad.  Bill seemed to last longer than the others.  Then, one morning, my grandmother came into the kitchen and found him dead, toppled onto the floor from a heart attack with his coffee growing cold on the table.  What we didn't find out until then was that my grandmother had early-onset Alzheimer's and had it pretty bad.  When her husband died, it fell on us, her children and grandchildren to care for her--and from personal experience that was a full-time and frustrating job.  She couldn't remember to do the most basic things, like getting dressed in the morning, and her mind wore a weary track of questions she couldn't remember the answers to--and couldn't recall asking just five minutes ago.  The official literature on Alzheimer's discourages loved ones from trying to care for those who suffer from the disease alone or without help as the stress can literally kill you.  Bill knew all about her Alzheimer's, but he never talked about it.  He never asked for help.  He knew his wife felt very strongly about nursing homes and so he never even let it be suggested that she be taken to one.  He took care of her alone, himself, and covered for her slip-ups on the phone as best he could until the stress of it all caught him at that kitchen table, rising early for his wife, and killed him.  There was a man!  You may argue him a fool for trying to do it all himself, but a noble fool he was.

All of these men are dead now.  As their bodies await the resurrection, their memories among the living will fade.  Who will show the generations to come what a man is, so that there may be great men in our world in times to come?  Do we dare take up the banner of these who have fallen?  If we do not dare, will our lives be of any worth, as men?

As for me--as the LORD God, by Whom I live, and breathe, and have my being, lives--I will take up their banner.  I will live as Christ my Lord, King, and Lover has lived, and--as He makes me able by His grace--I will die as He died, as they died.  I am not strong, but He will give me strength.  I am not brave, but He will give me courage.  I small and inconsistent in my love, but He will broaden and establish my heart by His Spirit.  By Him, I will be such a man!  I will live and die as such a man!  This is my quest, and for it may every hour and every breath of my life, to my very last, be spent.

So be it.

Backstory

So, I've been reading the manga "Rosario+Vampire."  If you've heard of it, it's probably not what you think.  The anime of the series is, if my friends and online articles are any reliable source, terrible--ditching the entire plot in favor of fanservice.  The manga is quite different.  The manga starts out as a simple "harem" comedy, where a perfectly ordinary boy accidentally enrolls in a high school where monsters learn to live in human guise.  Like any comedy of the genre, the boy (Tsukune) discovers his one true love, a fetching kind-hearted young vampiress named Moka--who in turn discovers a taste for Tsukune's blood.  Despite this rather disturbing taste, and the even more disturbing nature of the monster academy, Tsukune decides to stick it out so he and Moka can be together.  Immediately thereafter (and this is where the term "harem" comes in), girls start throwing themselves at Tsukune one after another, trying in vain to wrest his affections from Moka.  When they're not trying to beat each other up or hug-tackle Tsukune, the girls help Tsukune and Moka defeat the monster-of-the-week.  Hilarity ensues. Aside from the fact that Tsukune is in constant peril and is the only one who can remove Moka's rosario (transforming her from soft-hearted damsel-in-distress into a haughty vampiress whose round-house kick is capable of one-shotting nearly any opponent they meet), the manga is, at first, light-hearted and its contents fluffy--or so it seems.  Soon, Moka's trick of rescuing Tsukune from the brink of death with an infusion of vampire blood turns out to have some unexpected consequences, in the form of him being transformed into a ghoul--a soulless killing machine with all the power of the vapire(ss) who created him (and, apparently, none of the vulnerabilities).  He gets better (about the soulless part), but the latest issues delve into the backstory and show that much more is at play than was initially thought.  Moka (sans-rosario) isn't just a very powerful vampire, she's pretty much the most powerful vampire.  Her mom was part of a legendary three-monster team that took down an eldritch abomination of ultimate power bent on destroying the world.  Her mom can regenerate in minutes from being cut in half and her own round-house kicks pack more raw power than a bunker-buster.  And guess what?  Little Moka is heir to mom's incredible powers (not sure about the regeneration, but she's definitely got the power: as a 10-year old she blew a hole 6-foot square through a castle wall with one punch--and she wasn't even aiming at it!).  Better yet, that power isn't from genetics, but from blood.  Moka is the only one of her sisters (two of which have sadly gone dark-side) to have this power because she received an infusion of her mother's blood shortly after birth to help her survive.  And since Tsukune's ghoulish powers come from Moka's blood...yup, there's a pretty good chance that he's the ultimate incarnation of vampiric power there is.  The only hitch is that it turns out Moka's mom beat down the eldritch abomination by syncing her power to its, so that it was forced to slumber as long as she kept her powers in check.  And since mom's power is Moka's power--yeah, opening the throttle on that awakens the eldritch abomination...and there's a good chance Tsukune's power does that too.  So all that time they thought they were just harmlessly curb-stomping the monster-of-the-week it turns out they were actually poking the eldritch-abomination-of-ultimate-horror with a stick.  Things look pretty dark, but there's a ray of hope.  Moka's mom foresaw this link as a problem and made the rosario to seal Moka's power away (sacrificing herself in the process, sadly)--but she did so deliberately in such a way that only her one true love could remove it.  More, she designed it so that her one true love (when she met him) would remove it, because then it would be "time."  Time for what?  No idea, but the next volume is due out this month!

So you see, what was at the beginning just a comedy of errors is now revealed to be a stroke of destiny, bringing Moka and Tsukune (and company) together on a stage of epic proportions where the fate of the world is at stake...a lot can change when you know the backstory!

I'm betting the same is true in my life.  Things seem haphazard and kind of meaningless more often than not around here.  Sometimes I feel like I'm in a comedy of errors, but the jokes aren't all that funny and this is definitely not a "harem comedy!"  So let me take a step back and lay out the background of my story.  Let me see where it all fits in, if I'm able...

In the beginning, and before it, God existed alone, eternally complete, a unified being within Himself: Father, Spirit, Son.  Omnipotent and omniscient, He planned the creation of the world and all things and plotted their course, then brought it to pass for His own pleasure.  He made all things good.  He made the heavens and the earth and all things and beings that within them dwell.  He made angels as His ministers, among them Lucifer, a bright cherub, the covering of His throne.  He made humans also.  He made them to be His image, to have dominion on the earth over all creatures and reflect His glory and nature through their own.  He made them a little lower than the angels.  He made them male and female, equals, companions, compatriots, lovers, husband and wife.  He crafted the first marriage Himself when he brought the two of them--formed with His own hands for each other--together in the garden, where they were both naked and not ashamed.

He made them good and glorious, but He made them free.  They were able to choose whether to remain as they were or to corrupt themselves by turning their back on Him and taking their destinies into their own hands.  Lucifer took this path.  He became a murderer from the beginning and forsook the truth.  He became known as Satan, the Accuser, the Father of Lies.  He fell from Heaven like lightning, cast out after a great battle among the angels.  He deceived Eve and Adam in the garden, convincing them that God was holding back something that would be good for them, the fruit of the forbidden tree.  They took their destinies in their own hands.  They rebelled.  They ate the fruit and they Fell.  The penalty was death, and more horrible than they could imagine.  Not only would their bodies grow old and return to dust, but their souls would be subject to the full wrath and power of God for all eternity in Hell--the place prepared as the final prison of Satan and his angels, their unending punishment under darkness and in fire.  Even as they lived, their lives were cursed by the God against Whom they'd rebelled.  The woman gave birth in sorrow and great pain.  The man labored in vain all his days.  Even together, they had no solace, for the woman longed to control the man and the man dominated her like a tyrant.  All seemed lost as their curse spilled out over all creation and their ungodly children multiplied.  Their eldest son became a murderer and was cursed to walk in exile all his days.  The earth was so filled with violence that God confessed that He regretted making mankind and resolved to wipe them out by destroying the world in torrents of water.

But God had foreseen all this from the beginning and determined already what He would do.  From the beginning, He had made some of His creatures, like ungodly Cain, to be hateful "vessels of dishonor."  These He hardened and these He consumed in order to show the greatness of His power and justice.  Yet He had also made certain "vessels of mercy"--indistinguishable from the others to all but Him, for He had chosen them.  These, He choose to save and restore, to show the greatness of His love and mercy, and His power.  For these, He sent His Son in the fullness of time, born of a woman, born under the law and under the curse. He assumed the guise of humanity with all its complaints, but He was God and He lived without sin.  Then, as He had foretold in scripture and in person, He died an agonizing painful death.  He drank down the cup of the Father's wrath to the dregs and thus offered the mercy and love of God to all that He had chosen, to all who were given to Him, to all who came.

So He did destroy mankind and the world with a flood that day, but He also saved alive 8 chosen men and women in an ark He had prepared for them.  In time, He chose a man out of Mesopotamia to be the father of His special people.  The man was childless, but he believed, and in time God gave Him a son.  From that son proceeded a nation of millions.  They were enslaved, but God allowed this and raised up their captors only to cast them down again with plagues and miraculous destruction, to show His glory.  He led His people out, but they rebelled against Him in the wilderness.  He cursed and killed the rebels, but kept alive their children, who lived to see the promises made to their forefather fulfilled.  Yet the people continually rebelled. Their hearts were never fully His, and so He sent invaders to punish them.  In the end, He destroyed them, but saved a remnant.  It was from this remnant He brought forth His Son.

When His Son died, those who put their faith in Him saw the windows of Heaven opened and the Spirit descended on them, giving them miraculous power, and--most importantly--changing them from the inside out, at the level of the heart.  Finally, God's plan from eternity was revealed.  He was not merely seeking a remnant.  He was not seeking His own special ethnic group or kingdom.  He was seeking a Bride.  These believers, and those He had chosen throughout time, were that Bride.  They were individuals united as one, diverse in gifts, unified in heart and purpose.  Saved from death and Hell by the blood of the Son, they became His Bride, destined to enjoy His favor, His love, His power, every pleasure He could provide, and unity with Him, beginning in this life and made perfect as they cast off their mortal coils.

I am a member of this Church.  I am one of many, but I am loved as if I were the only one.  The power and wisdom of God watches over me, to guide me, to protect me, to perfect me in love.  There will be trials.  Trials grow character.  There will be opposition, but Satan is no match for the power with which I am united--the power of the God Who created and damned him.  That power, that love, that God will never leave me and I will be with Him forever.

This is my backstory.  I may not see how, but around me the hand of this destiny is at work.  Everyday situations are trials and opportunities, blessings and gifts of love, or banes from an enemy who hates me but cannot defeat me.  All of this is one step closer to my ultimate end, which is to be the Bride, at the side of my God, united with the Beloved forever.

Not so haphazard and meaningless anymore...

Tenacity of the Heart

I just finished reading a post by a friend of mine, a girl, who posted on some of the horrors of divorce and commented that one reason why she remains single is fear of the what ifs of divorce.  What if she got married and her husband just up and left her?  How would she go on with the man in her life missing?  Her fears, sadly, are legitimized by a great many statistics and personal stories.  However, in my opinion (and I say this more to any men in my audience than women, I suppose), if any woman finds her husband has given up and walked away, she need not really wonder what she must do now that she no longer has a man in her life: in my opinion she didn't have a man in her life to begin with.  A man would not walk away--at least not any man worth the name.

I suppose it's rather impetuous of me to say something like that.  After all, I'm single.  I always have been.  I don't know the pressures of a relationship or of a marriage--not firsthand--and so who am I to judge those who have and find them too much for them?  The answer is this: I am a man with a tenacious heart.  I am a man whose ideal of nobility is something like a picture of the Alamo, where 180 volunteers held out for three days against an army more than 10 times their size--volunteers who fought even knowing that the battle was lost before the first shot was fired.  My ideal of nobility, of masculinity, is a heart that does not let go, that refuses to walk away, the costs be damned.  When I hear a man recite his vows and say, "Till death do us part," I expect he means it literally.  Death may overtake him or her suddenly and part them, but if any other force threatens to part them, he would rather die than yield.

You may say I'm young and naive.  Overly optimistic, overly idealistic, and completely unrealistic.  Maybe I am, but that is who I am.  It is not just an ideal I have put up on a shelf in my mind to be forgotten.  It's something I live even in small ways.  It's this sense of the nobility of tenacity that has me writing this tonight.  It's one o'clock...well, one-thirty.  I worked a full day today, standing every minute of it because I'm a cashier.  Halfway through I felt ready for a nap, but I wouldn't rest then and won't rest now either.  I have something I have to do.  I've set my heart on finishing this blog entry (and another one, actually, mercifully brief) and I'm tenacious about it.  My legs may be cramping just a bit and I will definitely feel like cursing my name tomorrow morning when I have to wake up--possibly to have my entire life here turned upside down by evacuation orders--but my comfort and my sleep are expendable.  Something ought to be said about having tenacity of heart and I'm willing to suffer a bit to make it so--even knowing that this post will probably be viewed a grand total of 2 times, and those by random visitors from South Korea who get redirected here by some ad on a dating site (don't ask me! I'm just reading what it says on my blog's stats!).

Like I said, I haven't ever been in a relationship, but I have demonstrated it in similar ways.  In the rift that developed some months ago between myself and some of my friends I expended a lot of energy and shed a lot of tears trying to mend or hold on to the relationship which was, in retrospect, a lost cause.  I held on so long and so hard that I let the strain of it damage me at the deepest level: my relationship with God.  I remember literally pitching a screaming fit at Him during the heat of things, and (as in a previous post) it would take months for me to discover and heal the scars.  Even now, I would seize the chance to mend the rift, if it were to present itself.  Though it was in vain, I held on beyond the point of merely hurting myself and only let go when I literally had no other option--and this was a friendship where no vows were involved.

I knew during this ordeal that God wanted to use me to portray Himself, how He would love and pursue.  I think I understand now what He meant by that.  He wanted to show me that He is Himself tenacious.  Many times I have thought, I've done it now!  Surely after that, God will throw up His hands and walk away from me!  But He never does and He never will.  He has a noble tenacious heart.  To hold on to me, He literally sacrificed His life, enduring the most brutal death of human history, to save me.  Even if I were to somehow sever myself from Him (were it possible), He would willingly welcome me back.  He never gives up!  He never walks away, and when I find my dream girl and make my vows, I want to be as tenacious as Him.  I know I am not perfect, and that my blunders will probably endanger the relationship as much as anything else, but with God as my help and my model, may I never give up!