Barton Jahn's Blog, page 11
November 9, 2017
A Broken Heart
From my book God Didn't Create Robots---Commonsense Christian Apologetics
God takes us down a deserted road we would never travel by our own choice. No person purposely chooses the path leading to a broken heart…even if this is the best possible thing that could happen to us and for the benefit of others in our Christian ministry.
If we were fortunate enough to be grounded in orthodox biblical teaching as young Christians about the cross…and have realistic expectations about the costs of true discipleship…we still really do not…cannot…understand exactly how the life-long transition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty will break our self-centered will-and-way…and eventually break our hearts…for our eternal benefit.
We typically discover this final capstone development so deep into our adventure of faith storyline that when our last remaining trace of self-centeredness…even commendable self-centeredness when wrapped around the fulfillment of a positive future promise of God…when placed on our own cross alongside the cross of Jesus…we are so committed at that point in our faith-journey that we can do no other…than to go forward.
This I think is a part of what the prophet is saying in Jeremiah 20:7-9 and 20:14-18.
This I think is what Jesus the Son of God is crying out from the cross when He says as recorded in Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Jesus the divine Son of God…who has for all eternity been perfect goodness and pure brilliant light…experiences for the first and only time the taking upon Himself of the huge mass of human sin…past, present, and future…as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice…the rebellious rejection that is a part of the sin directed against Himself as the king and ruler of heaven and earth…but also this temporary separation between Himself and His Father caused by this massive infusion of mankind’s self-centeredness (Isa. 53:6)…a dual cause of separation which on the cross breaks His heart (Jn. 19:34-35).
It is not the self-centeredness of Jesus that is put to death on the cross…it is our self-centeredness applied to and absorbed by Him. The life-script and the character of Jesus Christ the Son of God have no self-centeredness. The God-composed life-script for Jesus was conceived and actualized entirely for our benefit.
One of the most insightful verses in all of scripture reads: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk, 22:42).
Here God amazingly shows us that He can write a life-script for the second Person of the Trinity…the divine Son of God Jesus…that actually challenges Himself in the precise area where we need the most help…the transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty.
But equally important, this Luke 22:42 verse tells us that Jesus had an alternate preference for exploring the possibility of another, different approach to accomplish the salvation of mankind…different from the upcoming ordeal of the cross the next day…a personal preference that nonetheless the Son of God perfectly and instantly subordinated to the will of the Father…in essence surrendering and relinquishing any alternate options or changes to the ancient plan of salvation…co-written by Jesus Himself with the Father and the Holy Spirit eons of time in the past…established before the foundation of the world.
This incredible interaction between Jesus the Son…and God the Father…tells us that in order to qualify Himself as the sole competent leader of our expeditions of faith into the discovery of the knowledge of good and evil…that Jesus not only understands the subtleties of our difficult transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…but that He also intimately understands the heart-breaking process of the death of our self-centeredness…having absorbed our self-centeredness in mass on the cross…a self-centeredness that was and is completely foreign to a perfect God.
The concept that God could experience sin and a broken heart by absorbing ours as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin…that He could manufacture for Himself an unimaginable Passover scenario whereby He could grasp the difficult rejection of self-centeredness in-the-moment on the cross from billions of human beings (my speculative musing)…self-centeredness that universally plagues the fallen state of humanity…by ingeniously crafting the series of events that would test this very thing (Lk. 22:42) in His own life in a human body through Jesus Christ the Son of God…is remarkable.
That God could pre-qualify Himself to be our Guide and Leader of the expedition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty…a route God never personally traversed prior to the incarnation of Jesus Christ…is a concept…an idea…that exists in the reality of our contemplation…and that by its very existence leaves the philosophy of naturalism miles behind.
The complexity of the information content in the life-script of Jesus Christ…and the novelty of its creative originality (Jn. 21:25)…makes a compelling case for its divine composition.
Pre-programmed robots could never have the capacity to make free-will choices and autonomous decisions. An inanimate rock boulder on a steep hillside does not choose to break-free and fall.
We choose to build a suspension bridge across a deep ravine. At the Saturday family picnic at the park…we choose to put mustard, or catsup, or pickle relish on our hot dog…or all of the above or none of the above.
We possess the incredible capacity for qualitative, discriminating, evaluative decisions and choices in an enumerable quantity of varied life situations.
But we do not voluntarily choose to have a broken heart by way of the cross.
This is another compelling commonsense argument for the divine origin of the Bible…and the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith.
There is zero motivation for any human writer to imaginatively invent this element of a broken heart inherent within a journey of faith…coming from the frame of reference of the contrary worldview of conventional normalcy and thinking that is based upon the pride of the appearance of outward success, self-adulation, and self-assurance…traversing in the opposite direction from brokenness.
As Abraham travels with his son Isaac to Mount Moriah…to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering…the heart of Abraham is broken.
But this deep into his faith-journey following God…Abraham cannot turn back. Abraham has already seen first-hand the truthfulness of God’s word and the faithfulness of His promises…and in this final test of faith regarding Isaac his beloved son…Abraham was ”Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure” (Heb. 11:19).
Does God allow Abraham to follow through and to kill his son Isaac as an offering for sin? The answer is no. That was never God’s intention.
Instead, God gives to mankind a prophetic foreglimpse of what He will do two thousand years later on Calvary Hill as His own Son Jesus dies on the cross as a righteous payment-in-full for the offenses of our sins.
Through the faith freely chosen and actualized by Abraham…he suffers a broken heart…in unknowing unselfishness at the time…for our benefit…in choosing to believe in and trust God…contrary to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This God-composed life-script for Abraham to become the “father of faith”…contained a broken heart at the precise point where self-sovereign self-rulership meets up with divine unselfishness…brilliantly scripted for the benefit of others and for Abraham…above anything Abraham could have imagined at the time.
This curiously unconventional theme of a broken heart is ingeniously repeated in some variation or another in every positive story of faith throughout the Bible…for Joseph prior to Pharaoh’s dream, for Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:11), for David at Ziklag, for Ruth after her husband’s death in Moab, for Esther and Mordecai (Est. 4:16), for Daniel in the lion’s den, for Peter at the night trial of Jesus, and for Paul after his tumultuous rejection in Jerusalem and before the Sanhedrin council…to name only a few biblical examples among many.
A broken heart…as a non-automated, non-robot…placed somewhere along the path after entering in at the narrow gate of Matthew 7:13-14…not only differentiates the biblical adventure of faith from all other religions, philosophies, and worldviews…but also validates the divine origin of God-composed adventures of faith as recorded in the biblical narrative stories of faith.
Nothing and no one other than God our Father could or would take us to the place of heart-brokenness where an advanced, beneficially usable knowledge of good and evil can be found…a place He Himself has painfully been in the heart-breaking and uniquely unprecedented experience of taking upon Himself the sins of mankind through Jesus Christ the Son of God…on the cross at Calvary.
But why the universal need for a broken heart along the way of our journeys of faith?
I think that as we…over time and experience…mature into seasoned Christians…like the exterior conflict of the cross of Christ set on Calvary Hill in Jerusalem two thousand years ago…when the self-centeredness of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking crashes up against the unselfishness of God-sovereignty…the result is a broken heart.
The thing that raises this discussion above any possible human creative invention…is that in a God-composed adventure of faith life-script containing the main ingredient of God-sovereignty…people of faith do not give up their self-autonomy. In a blender-mix that only God could create…the contrary ingredients of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty come together into a divine mixture in which neither is violated.
God created human beings in His image with the invaluable capacity of free-will. The very last thing God wants to do in our personal relationship with Him is to remove the very free-will component of our individuality and autonomy that differentiates us from an automated robot.
Only God can blend together the two disparate parts of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty into a functionally coherent, biblical-quality adventure of faith storyline that eventually produces brokenness…a broken heart.
The part of this discussion that begins to approximate the brilliance of the complexity and functional coherence we find in the structure of DNA…is the point in time along an adventure of faith when the mature Christian realizes that the costs of unselfish service in our called-out ministry equals or may even appear to exceed the perceived benefits in-the-moment (Lk. 22:42)…causing us to evaluate and question the value of going forward.
This is the point in time in Christian discipleship and service when we finally give up on any further self-efforts or self-contrivance…and surrender our own will-and-way to the higher ways of God…bringing the two together into a single joint-venture of mutually shared purpose and direction (Psalm 23).
When God takes us to the place where self-centered self-sovereignty and divinely unselfish God-sovereignty collide…our hearts break…but in actuality God is giving us something better…a piece of His divine character.
When God displaces the normative life Abraham would have lived in the city of Haran…with a higher life-script that Abraham would not have dreamed-up in his wildest imagination…God is giving us something immeasurably and incalculably better…the necessary character trait of selflessness…to thereby be able to successfully navigate through a knowledge of good and evil…for all eternity.
This is why our heart breaks…because the rebellion component of going our own way (Isa. 53:5-6) is dying on our cross so that our way can become one with God the Father’s way (Jn. 12:24-25).
Jesus confronted and overcame this very thing with perfectly executed faith in the Garden of Gethsemane…even though this may be one of the most difficult things God has or ever will do…and cost Jesus a broken heart on the cross as He absorbed within Himself this huge mass of sinful actions…along with the hundreds of millions of broken hearts like my own as people not only repent of their sins…but also make the perilous transition from self-centered, self-sovereign rebellion to God-sovereignty along the course of their journey of faith…all procured completely and perfectly through the textbook definition of unconventionality as demonstrated through the cross of Jesus Christ (Mt. 21:44).
This cannot possibly be the product of human creative invention. It is too sudden…too complex…and too functionally integrated within an entire coherent worldview of biblical quality faith…that is violently antithetical and repugnant to the contrasting, competing worldview that has us sitting atop the thrones of our lives…apart from God as independent agents…according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Like the question posited in chapter one about how difficult it is to get a perfect Person Jesus Christ to the cross…a similar question arises here as to how difficult it would be to break the heart of God? This again is not as easy as it sounds.
Only if God has to go before us through the earthly life of Jesus Christ the Son of God…incarnate in a human body…to fully experience out ahead of us everything that will challenge us in redemptive salvation and a transforming journey of faith…to honorably and commendably dispel the notion of being a distant, armchair, uninvolved God…can God help us to master the lesson-plan of relying upon God-sovereignty in our pursuit of an understanding of the knowledge of good and evil (Jn. 16:13) while at the same time maintaining our God-created and God-given capacity for free-will moral reasoning.
The only thing that could break the heart of a perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful God…is to lovingly and unselfishly…according to the highest precepts of righteous judgment… to take upon Himself the penalty for the imperfect sins of mankind…and in the process experience momentarily the separation between Son and Father…that Jesus expresses from the cross…”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15:34)…and then to say minutes or hours later: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”…”and having said thus, he gave up the spirit” (Lk. 23:46) in perfectly executed faith and trust.
Brokenness is certainly not a new concept to Christianity. Many books, commentaries, sermons, and great Christian hymns have brilliantly covered this subject. A recent example in church history is John Bunyan the author of the classic book A Pilgrim’s Progress…its huge worldwide impact in part the product of the high cost of a broken heart…being written from a jail cell…separated from his loving family.
But I wonder how many people have written about the apologetic value of brokenness…of the complexity of its information content…of the originality of its relationship to God-sovereignty as a universal component in biblical faith, and the sheer fantasy of this being a humanistic literary invention given its utter contrast with the pride of the worldly conventional thinking of placing “me, myself, and I” first in everything?
When skeptics assert that the biblical narrative stories of faith are fictional nonsense…what they themselves are saying is itself nonsensical.
These biblical stories are too far advanced…have progressed too far along…are too complex and functionally integrated to be fiction.
Skepticism that classifies the biblical stories as mere fiction display a shallowness and shortsightedness of analytical thinking that disqualifies their claims…that reveals a scholarship that not only does not dig deep enough…but does not even scratch below the surface.
The interaction between people of faith and a God who crafts life-scripts of events and circumstances having the pinpoint accuracy to procure broken-heartedness as a beneficial by-product of the move from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…has taken us so far beyond human literary invention as to render the proclamations of atheists and skeptics about the origin of the life-stories of the biblical characters…to be nonsensical.
God takes us down a deserted road we would never travel by our own choice. No person purposely chooses the path leading to a broken heart…even if this is the best possible thing that could happen to us and for the benefit of others in our Christian ministry.
If we were fortunate enough to be grounded in orthodox biblical teaching as young Christians about the cross…and have realistic expectations about the costs of true discipleship…we still really do not…cannot…understand exactly how the life-long transition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty will break our self-centered will-and-way…and eventually break our hearts…for our eternal benefit.
We typically discover this final capstone development so deep into our adventure of faith storyline that when our last remaining trace of self-centeredness…even commendable self-centeredness when wrapped around the fulfillment of a positive future promise of God…when placed on our own cross alongside the cross of Jesus…we are so committed at that point in our faith-journey that we can do no other…than to go forward.
This I think is a part of what the prophet is saying in Jeremiah 20:7-9 and 20:14-18.
This I think is what Jesus the Son of God is crying out from the cross when He says as recorded in Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Jesus the divine Son of God…who has for all eternity been perfect goodness and pure brilliant light…experiences for the first and only time the taking upon Himself of the huge mass of human sin…past, present, and future…as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice…the rebellious rejection that is a part of the sin directed against Himself as the king and ruler of heaven and earth…but also this temporary separation between Himself and His Father caused by this massive infusion of mankind’s self-centeredness (Isa. 53:6)…a dual cause of separation which on the cross breaks His heart (Jn. 19:34-35).
It is not the self-centeredness of Jesus that is put to death on the cross…it is our self-centeredness applied to and absorbed by Him. The life-script and the character of Jesus Christ the Son of God have no self-centeredness. The God-composed life-script for Jesus was conceived and actualized entirely for our benefit.
One of the most insightful verses in all of scripture reads: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Lk, 22:42).
Here God amazingly shows us that He can write a life-script for the second Person of the Trinity…the divine Son of God Jesus…that actually challenges Himself in the precise area where we need the most help…the transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty.
But equally important, this Luke 22:42 verse tells us that Jesus had an alternate preference for exploring the possibility of another, different approach to accomplish the salvation of mankind…different from the upcoming ordeal of the cross the next day…a personal preference that nonetheless the Son of God perfectly and instantly subordinated to the will of the Father…in essence surrendering and relinquishing any alternate options or changes to the ancient plan of salvation…co-written by Jesus Himself with the Father and the Holy Spirit eons of time in the past…established before the foundation of the world.
This incredible interaction between Jesus the Son…and God the Father…tells us that in order to qualify Himself as the sole competent leader of our expeditions of faith into the discovery of the knowledge of good and evil…that Jesus not only understands the subtleties of our difficult transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…but that He also intimately understands the heart-breaking process of the death of our self-centeredness…having absorbed our self-centeredness in mass on the cross…a self-centeredness that was and is completely foreign to a perfect God.
The concept that God could experience sin and a broken heart by absorbing ours as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin…that He could manufacture for Himself an unimaginable Passover scenario whereby He could grasp the difficult rejection of self-centeredness in-the-moment on the cross from billions of human beings (my speculative musing)…self-centeredness that universally plagues the fallen state of humanity…by ingeniously crafting the series of events that would test this very thing (Lk. 22:42) in His own life in a human body through Jesus Christ the Son of God…is remarkable.
That God could pre-qualify Himself to be our Guide and Leader of the expedition from self-sovereign self-rulership to God-sovereignty…a route God never personally traversed prior to the incarnation of Jesus Christ…is a concept…an idea…that exists in the reality of our contemplation…and that by its very existence leaves the philosophy of naturalism miles behind.
The complexity of the information content in the life-script of Jesus Christ…and the novelty of its creative originality (Jn. 21:25)…makes a compelling case for its divine composition.
Pre-programmed robots could never have the capacity to make free-will choices and autonomous decisions. An inanimate rock boulder on a steep hillside does not choose to break-free and fall.
We choose to build a suspension bridge across a deep ravine. At the Saturday family picnic at the park…we choose to put mustard, or catsup, or pickle relish on our hot dog…or all of the above or none of the above.
We possess the incredible capacity for qualitative, discriminating, evaluative decisions and choices in an enumerable quantity of varied life situations.
But we do not voluntarily choose to have a broken heart by way of the cross.
This is another compelling commonsense argument for the divine origin of the Bible…and the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith.
There is zero motivation for any human writer to imaginatively invent this element of a broken heart inherent within a journey of faith…coming from the frame of reference of the contrary worldview of conventional normalcy and thinking that is based upon the pride of the appearance of outward success, self-adulation, and self-assurance…traversing in the opposite direction from brokenness.
As Abraham travels with his son Isaac to Mount Moriah…to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering…the heart of Abraham is broken.
But this deep into his faith-journey following God…Abraham cannot turn back. Abraham has already seen first-hand the truthfulness of God’s word and the faithfulness of His promises…and in this final test of faith regarding Isaac his beloved son…Abraham was ”Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure” (Heb. 11:19).
Does God allow Abraham to follow through and to kill his son Isaac as an offering for sin? The answer is no. That was never God’s intention.
Instead, God gives to mankind a prophetic foreglimpse of what He will do two thousand years later on Calvary Hill as His own Son Jesus dies on the cross as a righteous payment-in-full for the offenses of our sins.
Through the faith freely chosen and actualized by Abraham…he suffers a broken heart…in unknowing unselfishness at the time…for our benefit…in choosing to believe in and trust God…contrary to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This God-composed life-script for Abraham to become the “father of faith”…contained a broken heart at the precise point where self-sovereign self-rulership meets up with divine unselfishness…brilliantly scripted for the benefit of others and for Abraham…above anything Abraham could have imagined at the time.
This curiously unconventional theme of a broken heart is ingeniously repeated in some variation or another in every positive story of faith throughout the Bible…for Joseph prior to Pharaoh’s dream, for Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:11), for David at Ziklag, for Ruth after her husband’s death in Moab, for Esther and Mordecai (Est. 4:16), for Daniel in the lion’s den, for Peter at the night trial of Jesus, and for Paul after his tumultuous rejection in Jerusalem and before the Sanhedrin council…to name only a few biblical examples among many.
A broken heart…as a non-automated, non-robot…placed somewhere along the path after entering in at the narrow gate of Matthew 7:13-14…not only differentiates the biblical adventure of faith from all other religions, philosophies, and worldviews…but also validates the divine origin of God-composed adventures of faith as recorded in the biblical narrative stories of faith.
Nothing and no one other than God our Father could or would take us to the place of heart-brokenness where an advanced, beneficially usable knowledge of good and evil can be found…a place He Himself has painfully been in the heart-breaking and uniquely unprecedented experience of taking upon Himself the sins of mankind through Jesus Christ the Son of God…on the cross at Calvary.
But why the universal need for a broken heart along the way of our journeys of faith?
I think that as we…over time and experience…mature into seasoned Christians…like the exterior conflict of the cross of Christ set on Calvary Hill in Jerusalem two thousand years ago…when the self-centeredness of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking crashes up against the unselfishness of God-sovereignty…the result is a broken heart.
The thing that raises this discussion above any possible human creative invention…is that in a God-composed adventure of faith life-script containing the main ingredient of God-sovereignty…people of faith do not give up their self-autonomy. In a blender-mix that only God could create…the contrary ingredients of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty come together into a divine mixture in which neither is violated.
God created human beings in His image with the invaluable capacity of free-will. The very last thing God wants to do in our personal relationship with Him is to remove the very free-will component of our individuality and autonomy that differentiates us from an automated robot.
Only God can blend together the two disparate parts of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty into a functionally coherent, biblical-quality adventure of faith storyline that eventually produces brokenness…a broken heart.
The part of this discussion that begins to approximate the brilliance of the complexity and functional coherence we find in the structure of DNA…is the point in time along an adventure of faith when the mature Christian realizes that the costs of unselfish service in our called-out ministry equals or may even appear to exceed the perceived benefits in-the-moment (Lk. 22:42)…causing us to evaluate and question the value of going forward.
This is the point in time in Christian discipleship and service when we finally give up on any further self-efforts or self-contrivance…and surrender our own will-and-way to the higher ways of God…bringing the two together into a single joint-venture of mutually shared purpose and direction (Psalm 23).
When God takes us to the place where self-centered self-sovereignty and divinely unselfish God-sovereignty collide…our hearts break…but in actuality God is giving us something better…a piece of His divine character.
When God displaces the normative life Abraham would have lived in the city of Haran…with a higher life-script that Abraham would not have dreamed-up in his wildest imagination…God is giving us something immeasurably and incalculably better…the necessary character trait of selflessness…to thereby be able to successfully navigate through a knowledge of good and evil…for all eternity.
This is why our heart breaks…because the rebellion component of going our own way (Isa. 53:5-6) is dying on our cross so that our way can become one with God the Father’s way (Jn. 12:24-25).
Jesus confronted and overcame this very thing with perfectly executed faith in the Garden of Gethsemane…even though this may be one of the most difficult things God has or ever will do…and cost Jesus a broken heart on the cross as He absorbed within Himself this huge mass of sinful actions…along with the hundreds of millions of broken hearts like my own as people not only repent of their sins…but also make the perilous transition from self-centered, self-sovereign rebellion to God-sovereignty along the course of their journey of faith…all procured completely and perfectly through the textbook definition of unconventionality as demonstrated through the cross of Jesus Christ (Mt. 21:44).
This cannot possibly be the product of human creative invention. It is too sudden…too complex…and too functionally integrated within an entire coherent worldview of biblical quality faith…that is violently antithetical and repugnant to the contrasting, competing worldview that has us sitting atop the thrones of our lives…apart from God as independent agents…according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Like the question posited in chapter one about how difficult it is to get a perfect Person Jesus Christ to the cross…a similar question arises here as to how difficult it would be to break the heart of God? This again is not as easy as it sounds.
Only if God has to go before us through the earthly life of Jesus Christ the Son of God…incarnate in a human body…to fully experience out ahead of us everything that will challenge us in redemptive salvation and a transforming journey of faith…to honorably and commendably dispel the notion of being a distant, armchair, uninvolved God…can God help us to master the lesson-plan of relying upon God-sovereignty in our pursuit of an understanding of the knowledge of good and evil (Jn. 16:13) while at the same time maintaining our God-created and God-given capacity for free-will moral reasoning.
The only thing that could break the heart of a perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful God…is to lovingly and unselfishly…according to the highest precepts of righteous judgment… to take upon Himself the penalty for the imperfect sins of mankind…and in the process experience momentarily the separation between Son and Father…that Jesus expresses from the cross…”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15:34)…and then to say minutes or hours later: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”…”and having said thus, he gave up the spirit” (Lk. 23:46) in perfectly executed faith and trust.
Brokenness is certainly not a new concept to Christianity. Many books, commentaries, sermons, and great Christian hymns have brilliantly covered this subject. A recent example in church history is John Bunyan the author of the classic book A Pilgrim’s Progress…its huge worldwide impact in part the product of the high cost of a broken heart…being written from a jail cell…separated from his loving family.
But I wonder how many people have written about the apologetic value of brokenness…of the complexity of its information content…of the originality of its relationship to God-sovereignty as a universal component in biblical faith, and the sheer fantasy of this being a humanistic literary invention given its utter contrast with the pride of the worldly conventional thinking of placing “me, myself, and I” first in everything?
When skeptics assert that the biblical narrative stories of faith are fictional nonsense…what they themselves are saying is itself nonsensical.
These biblical stories are too far advanced…have progressed too far along…are too complex and functionally integrated to be fiction.
Skepticism that classifies the biblical stories as mere fiction display a shallowness and shortsightedness of analytical thinking that disqualifies their claims…that reveals a scholarship that not only does not dig deep enough…but does not even scratch below the surface.
The interaction between people of faith and a God who crafts life-scripts of events and circumstances having the pinpoint accuracy to procure broken-heartedness as a beneficial by-product of the move from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…has taken us so far beyond human literary invention as to render the proclamations of atheists and skeptics about the origin of the life-stories of the biblical characters…to be nonsensical.
October 5, 2017
Contemporary Apologetics
Part 2
Atheists and skeptics cannot see the displacement element within biblical journeys of faith…first because their starting worldview bias of unbelief so thoroughly blinds them they cannot see the data…and second this concept does not exist anywhere within the expanse of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…to draw meaningful comparisons with.
This is why the concept of biblical faith…of God displacing our ways with His ways according to the cross of Christ…falls outside of the field of comparative religious studies…because the starting premise of comparative religious studies is that all religions have a humanistic origin.
But the critical point I want to make here is that Satan does not want to get anywhere near this central biblical concept of the inducement of God-sovereignty into people’s lives by means of the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways…this uniquely inexplicable transition from worldly conventional self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…that is built into every narrative story of faith in the Bible.
Satan will not attack this exclusively biblical concept outright and directly…because he does not want it out in the open. This is an element of cunning malice and diabolical deception that has yet to be fully unearthed and articulated within the apologetics arena…because it will not originate from the direction of philosophical atheism to be responded to in the “normal” way in the Christian apologetics reactive mode.
This specific argument for the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible…must originate from within Christian experience and theology.
There are two halves to the cross. Salvation by grace through faith…through the blood of Christ shed on the cross…the first half…is the way into the second half…a divinely composed journey of faith for new covenant Christians (Jer. 31:31-34).
Ephesians 6:12 tells us that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
Satan has been working to prevent people from entering into the kingdom of God…for thousands of years…through the use of cunningly deceptive arguments and the most alluring enticements of worldly wealth, power, and fame (Mt. 4:8-9; Mk. 8:36).
But Satan also does not want the second half of the cross...the displacement of our ways with God’s ways…out there in open debate for consideration.
Satan cannot attack the displacement element that produces the context for God-sovereignty to actualize in people’s lives…in open debate coming from the zone of philosophical atheism as has been typical in the past…because this concept does not exist anywhere in worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Acknowledging its existence indirectly validates its divine origin.
It cannot be brought lower…reduced down into the horizontal zone of worldly conventional thinking…without giving away the clear inference of its divine origin…because nothing in worldly conventional normalcy and thinking relates to this unique concept.
I have the greatest admiration for the Christian apologists who debate world-renowned atheists in an open public forum. I liken this to the steely courage and confidence needed by concert pianists or violinists performing concertos live on the stages of Carnegie Hall or the Hollywood Bowl…or to the confidence that major league baseball shortstops must have upon taking the field to start the game…knowing that the first pitch may be a groundball hit deep in the hole between third base and shortstop…necessitating getting to the ground ball…catching it…and then turning to throw a “bullet” across the infield diamond to get the speedy lead-off hitter out by a step.
The breadth of the preparation and the mastery of the subject matter are to be admired on both sides of the argument regarding the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible.
But I think the most important elements are missing in the debate. Both halves of the cross…the humility of Jesus that gets Him all the way to the cross…and the worldly infuriating component of the gospel message that jettisons worldly conventional normalcy and thinking overboard…along with the galactically unconventional process of a biblical-quality journey of faith that introduces God-sovereignty into our lives through the second half of the cross…uniformly portrayed throughout the Bible…is in my view almost irrefutable evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible…because its origin cannot come from human literary invention.
This is the main thesis put forward in this book…out in the open and accessible to commonsense contemplation.
Atheists and skeptics cannot see the displacement element within biblical journeys of faith…first because their starting worldview bias of unbelief so thoroughly blinds them they cannot see the data…and second this concept does not exist anywhere within the expanse of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…to draw meaningful comparisons with.
This is why the concept of biblical faith…of God displacing our ways with His ways according to the cross of Christ…falls outside of the field of comparative religious studies…because the starting premise of comparative religious studies is that all religions have a humanistic origin.
But the critical point I want to make here is that Satan does not want to get anywhere near this central biblical concept of the inducement of God-sovereignty into people’s lives by means of the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways…this uniquely inexplicable transition from worldly conventional self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty…that is built into every narrative story of faith in the Bible.
Satan will not attack this exclusively biblical concept outright and directly…because he does not want it out in the open. This is an element of cunning malice and diabolical deception that has yet to be fully unearthed and articulated within the apologetics arena…because it will not originate from the direction of philosophical atheism to be responded to in the “normal” way in the Christian apologetics reactive mode.
This specific argument for the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible…must originate from within Christian experience and theology.
There are two halves to the cross. Salvation by grace through faith…through the blood of Christ shed on the cross…the first half…is the way into the second half…a divinely composed journey of faith for new covenant Christians (Jer. 31:31-34).
Ephesians 6:12 tells us that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
Satan has been working to prevent people from entering into the kingdom of God…for thousands of years…through the use of cunningly deceptive arguments and the most alluring enticements of worldly wealth, power, and fame (Mt. 4:8-9; Mk. 8:36).
But Satan also does not want the second half of the cross...the displacement of our ways with God’s ways…out there in open debate for consideration.
Satan cannot attack the displacement element that produces the context for God-sovereignty to actualize in people’s lives…in open debate coming from the zone of philosophical atheism as has been typical in the past…because this concept does not exist anywhere in worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Acknowledging its existence indirectly validates its divine origin.
It cannot be brought lower…reduced down into the horizontal zone of worldly conventional thinking…without giving away the clear inference of its divine origin…because nothing in worldly conventional normalcy and thinking relates to this unique concept.
I have the greatest admiration for the Christian apologists who debate world-renowned atheists in an open public forum. I liken this to the steely courage and confidence needed by concert pianists or violinists performing concertos live on the stages of Carnegie Hall or the Hollywood Bowl…or to the confidence that major league baseball shortstops must have upon taking the field to start the game…knowing that the first pitch may be a groundball hit deep in the hole between third base and shortstop…necessitating getting to the ground ball…catching it…and then turning to throw a “bullet” across the infield diamond to get the speedy lead-off hitter out by a step.
The breadth of the preparation and the mastery of the subject matter are to be admired on both sides of the argument regarding the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible.
But I think the most important elements are missing in the debate. Both halves of the cross…the humility of Jesus that gets Him all the way to the cross…and the worldly infuriating component of the gospel message that jettisons worldly conventional normalcy and thinking overboard…along with the galactically unconventional process of a biblical-quality journey of faith that introduces God-sovereignty into our lives through the second half of the cross…uniformly portrayed throughout the Bible…is in my view almost irrefutable evidence for the existence of God and the truth of the Bible…because its origin cannot come from human literary invention.
This is the main thesis put forward in this book…out in the open and accessible to commonsense contemplation.
October 4, 2017
Contemporary Apologetics
From the introduction in my new book: God Didn't Create Robots: Commonsense Christian Apologetics.
Part 1
When atheists and religious skeptics today attack Christianity and the Bible…in my opinion they are attacking the wrong things…in a cleverly disguised diversionary tactic…unbeknownst to them.
In the contemporary apologetics debate…about the reasonableness of faith and the existence of God…the questions raised and the answers given in response…are both equally brilliant and well-articulated. They represent the highest and the best of human thinking.
But the program of Christian apologetics…as brilliantly persuasive as it is…is largely the product of responses to criticisms and objections coming out of philosophical atheism over the past three or four hundred years.
The formulation of the systematic Christian apologetics argument has been largely reactive…ably constructed piece-by-piece in response to criticisms about the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible…originating naturally and historically out of the Scientific Revolution, the Doctrine of Progress stemming from the two Industrial Revolutions, and the enormous progress that has been made in the political, economic, social, and cultural structures of modern societies.
But the problem here is that in the reactive mode…in the defensive position of responding to criticisms and objections raised by atheists and skeptics…most if not all of the issues debated…land within what I call in this book worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…when placed on the graduated vertical spectrum of goodness and light (discussed here and throughout this book)…fall well below the biblical narrative stories of faith.
Such issues as the foibles of institutionalized Christianity when it overlaps into “religion”…the seeming difficulty in explaining the presence of evil and suffering…whether or not the multi-verse or many-worlds hypothesis is a plausible chance-substitute explanation for the obvious intelligent design we observe in the fine-tuning of the natural world from the galactic scale of the Big-Bang down to the microscopic world of DNA…the reliability of the Old and New Testaments texts as ancient documents…the historical validity of the gospel records of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ…these and other issues belong to a group of typical and repetitive topics that …by definition and somewhat by necessity due to change and progress…have arisen from within the skeptical and anti-theistic zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (1 Cor. 2:6-12).
But the centermost issue at the heart of reality…the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways…which enables God-sovereignty to become actualized in people’s lives…throughout the Bible and in the lives of tens of millions of Spirit-born Christians today…is entirely missed by religious skeptics…and avoided at all costs by Satan.
Part 1
When atheists and religious skeptics today attack Christianity and the Bible…in my opinion they are attacking the wrong things…in a cleverly disguised diversionary tactic…unbeknownst to them.
In the contemporary apologetics debate…about the reasonableness of faith and the existence of God…the questions raised and the answers given in response…are both equally brilliant and well-articulated. They represent the highest and the best of human thinking.
But the program of Christian apologetics…as brilliantly persuasive as it is…is largely the product of responses to criticisms and objections coming out of philosophical atheism over the past three or four hundred years.
The formulation of the systematic Christian apologetics argument has been largely reactive…ably constructed piece-by-piece in response to criticisms about the existence of God and the truthfulness of the Bible…originating naturally and historically out of the Scientific Revolution, the Doctrine of Progress stemming from the two Industrial Revolutions, and the enormous progress that has been made in the political, economic, social, and cultural structures of modern societies.
But the problem here is that in the reactive mode…in the defensive position of responding to criticisms and objections raised by atheists and skeptics…most if not all of the issues debated…land within what I call in this book worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…when placed on the graduated vertical spectrum of goodness and light (discussed here and throughout this book)…fall well below the biblical narrative stories of faith.
Such issues as the foibles of institutionalized Christianity when it overlaps into “religion”…the seeming difficulty in explaining the presence of evil and suffering…whether or not the multi-verse or many-worlds hypothesis is a plausible chance-substitute explanation for the obvious intelligent design we observe in the fine-tuning of the natural world from the galactic scale of the Big-Bang down to the microscopic world of DNA…the reliability of the Old and New Testaments texts as ancient documents…the historical validity of the gospel records of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ…these and other issues belong to a group of typical and repetitive topics that …by definition and somewhat by necessity due to change and progress…have arisen from within the skeptical and anti-theistic zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (1 Cor. 2:6-12).
But the centermost issue at the heart of reality…the displacement of our ways with God’s higher ways…which enables God-sovereignty to become actualized in people’s lives…throughout the Bible and in the lives of tens of millions of Spirit-born Christians today…is entirely missed by religious skeptics…and avoided at all costs by Satan.
May 18, 2017
God Has Our Back
God has our back in a crisis. The only way we would know this is by actual experience…by being in the middle of a shooting war.
This has to be true…because it cannot be fiction. It does not hold up as fiction. Once it rises to the level of becoming recorded in writing…put down on paper…it enters the arena of being testable.
David’s 23rd Psalm is true because it cannot be fiction. Once David writes about walking through the valley of the shadow of death with God at his side…then fiction-writing becomes nonsensical…because the concept of the living God participating in our lives to this extent…at the center of our life-scripts…is too far outside of the default, conventional worldview thinking of sitting atop the thrones of our lives in self-sovereignty.
What would be the point of making this Psalm 23 up? Following God would not hold water for any period of time within actual lived experience…unless God is real…and that we can experience His active participation in our lives.
This is the root of what was so threatening to the religious leaders in Jerusalem in the first-century that led to crucifying Jesus Christ. This is part of the “mystery” of iniquity…the conflict between self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty in our lives that produced the cross, the resurrection, and our salvation.
The risk factor involved in walking through a genuine journey of faith following the living God…is itself powerful and persuasive evidence that supports the divine origin of the Bible…because as fiction it cannot and would not exist for any length of time. Minutes, hours, or days of actual tested experience would quickly expose this concept as empty fantasy.
If God is “not home,” His brilliantly imaginative solutions that soar above human creativity and invention…would not only be inaccessible…they would be outside of human conception and contemplation altogether. Someone inventing the 23rd Psalm…as fiction writing…has no motivational or conceptual legs…it does not take us anywhere within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking. It is inconceivable to the person committed to following their own way according to self-rulership.
This should be a clear red flag to anyone involved in the debate over the existence of God. The fundamental first question…like the Big Bang, the Cambrian Explosion, and DNA…is what or who is the source of the completely novel and innovative alternative worldview of a God-composed journey of faith life-script starting with the life of Abraham…continued through all the narrative stories of faith containing the cross of Christ (Lk. 22:42) down to the Christian experience in our modern times…that is so utterly contrary to the conventionally accepted life-approach of going our own way in self-direction and self-autonomy.
In modern speech…a biblical-quality adventure of faith…if fiction…if false…then it would have no “there there.” It would be without substance.
If there is no active engagement between God and people…then there is nothing to write about. This is why God-composed adventure of faith life-scripts are not found to exist in other religions, philosophies, and worldviews. This is why adventures of faith fall outside and above the zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This is a plausible apologetic argument for biblical Christianity that is never raised by atheists and skeptical critics…because they cannot even see it.
It can only be raised by Spirit-born and led Christians who have been in the danger zone of faith in a “shooting war” that has consequences in life…because people personally led and taught of God are the only people on the planet aware of this reality.
The idea that a God-scripted life-plan is so far outside of conventional thinking…is itself a compelling and persuasive argument for the truth of its existence…because it is inexplicable as human invented fiction.
If Christians do not see the unconventional cross of Christ skillfully embedded within the script of every biblical narrative story of faith…because they have not experienced God having our back in a crisis…then this positive and compelling apologetic argument for the divine origin of an adventure of faith…completely unknown outside of the Bible…will not be made.
It will be missed in the competing marketplace of ideas.
This has to be true…because it cannot be fiction. It does not hold up as fiction. Once it rises to the level of becoming recorded in writing…put down on paper…it enters the arena of being testable.
David’s 23rd Psalm is true because it cannot be fiction. Once David writes about walking through the valley of the shadow of death with God at his side…then fiction-writing becomes nonsensical…because the concept of the living God participating in our lives to this extent…at the center of our life-scripts…is too far outside of the default, conventional worldview thinking of sitting atop the thrones of our lives in self-sovereignty.
What would be the point of making this Psalm 23 up? Following God would not hold water for any period of time within actual lived experience…unless God is real…and that we can experience His active participation in our lives.
This is the root of what was so threatening to the religious leaders in Jerusalem in the first-century that led to crucifying Jesus Christ. This is part of the “mystery” of iniquity…the conflict between self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty in our lives that produced the cross, the resurrection, and our salvation.
The risk factor involved in walking through a genuine journey of faith following the living God…is itself powerful and persuasive evidence that supports the divine origin of the Bible…because as fiction it cannot and would not exist for any length of time. Minutes, hours, or days of actual tested experience would quickly expose this concept as empty fantasy.
If God is “not home,” His brilliantly imaginative solutions that soar above human creativity and invention…would not only be inaccessible…they would be outside of human conception and contemplation altogether. Someone inventing the 23rd Psalm…as fiction writing…has no motivational or conceptual legs…it does not take us anywhere within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking. It is inconceivable to the person committed to following their own way according to self-rulership.
This should be a clear red flag to anyone involved in the debate over the existence of God. The fundamental first question…like the Big Bang, the Cambrian Explosion, and DNA…is what or who is the source of the completely novel and innovative alternative worldview of a God-composed journey of faith life-script starting with the life of Abraham…continued through all the narrative stories of faith containing the cross of Christ (Lk. 22:42) down to the Christian experience in our modern times…that is so utterly contrary to the conventionally accepted life-approach of going our own way in self-direction and self-autonomy.
In modern speech…a biblical-quality adventure of faith…if fiction…if false…then it would have no “there there.” It would be without substance.
If there is no active engagement between God and people…then there is nothing to write about. This is why God-composed adventure of faith life-scripts are not found to exist in other religions, philosophies, and worldviews. This is why adventures of faith fall outside and above the zone of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This is a plausible apologetic argument for biblical Christianity that is never raised by atheists and skeptical critics…because they cannot even see it.
It can only be raised by Spirit-born and led Christians who have been in the danger zone of faith in a “shooting war” that has consequences in life…because people personally led and taught of God are the only people on the planet aware of this reality.
The idea that a God-scripted life-plan is so far outside of conventional thinking…is itself a compelling and persuasive argument for the truth of its existence…because it is inexplicable as human invented fiction.
If Christians do not see the unconventional cross of Christ skillfully embedded within the script of every biblical narrative story of faith…because they have not experienced God having our back in a crisis…then this positive and compelling apologetic argument for the divine origin of an adventure of faith…completely unknown outside of the Bible…will not be made.
It will be missed in the competing marketplace of ideas.
May 13, 2017
Purpose and the Cross
The best example to illustrate the perfection of the purposes of God is the life-script of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. What is seamlessly perfect about the divinely composed life-plan of Jesus is that it is absolutely unselfish. Jesus is not leisurely sailing the Mediterranean Sea with people waiting upon Him to satisfy His every need. Everything that Jesus does is for us. Even though the suffering of the cross adds a new perspective to God’s reality that He never experienced before (Hebrews 5:7-9), there is no redemptive value for Jesus Christ on the cross, because Jesus does not need redemption from sin. Jesus is the perfect Lamb of God sacrifice for the sins of the world. The sacrifice on the cross is for us.
What is astounding is that God is so brilliantly creative that He can compose a life-script for the perfect Son of God Jesus Christ, which actually contains an element of challenging difficulty. God knew that we would have difficulty with the second half of the cross that requires our self-in-charge nature to be set aside so that God can effectively work with us. Jesus says in Luke 12:50 “But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am straightened till it be accomplished!” (KJV), not because, like us, Jesus is in need of character growth through adversity. Jesus is already divinely perfect.
In Luke 22:44, it is recorded that Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane went back a second time to “pray more earnestly.” This is beyond our comprehension. We would normally assume that everything Jesus did, especially prayer, was perfect the first time. In Luke 22:42 Jesus prays “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” How can God be so brilliantly creative to be able to write into the earthly experience of the divine Son of God Jesus, the element of difficult challenge which is totally foreign to the perfect nature of God, just so He could tell us He personally understands our own difficulty in picking up our cross in order to follow God? Even within the absolute perfection of the ways and purposes of God, the life-script of Jesus manages to contain God-challenging elements of difficulty written-in for our future consolation and encouragement. This touches me at the capacity of my intellect and the depth of my heart.
It is the precise and intricate ways and purposes of God that enlists our own in-built facility for purpose, which can be integrated by God into any set of current life circumstances and events. Whether we are a heart surgeon, congresswoman, appellate court judge, school teacher, auto mechanic, pastor of a small-town church, writer of Christian books, or housewife raising children, God can overlay and integrate His higher ways and purposes into our lives if we will surrender and yield our self-wills to Him in faith and trust. The deliverance and salvation of God within the challenges of life, expressed so beautifully throughout the Psalms, takes place within the plans of God, and not our own. Innate purpose translates into reality at the highest most glorious level when orchestrated and directed within the framework of a God-composed journey of faith.
Sometimes purpose and worldly conventional normalcy do not mix. Sometimes we cannot have both the risk-filled pursuit of truth and the security of conventional normalcy simultaneously within the dynamics of this broken world. Jesus, the Lamb-of-God sacrifice for the sins of the world can only die and be resurrected if His generation rejects and crucifies Him. Only God can knit together a meaningful and purposeful tapestry of the commendable aspects of the Protestant work ethic with the worldly incomprehensible, biblical journey of faith through the cross of Calvary.
All of the people of faith in the Bible gave up some measure of worldly conventional normalcy in following God’s life-script for them. This separates out and elevates the quality of purpose and meaning into a higher zone that only God can orchestrate. This highlights the wisdom of God in the area of purpose, and like the scriptural example of God composing a life-script for Jesus that contained challenging difficulty for our consolation, it reveals an imaginative creativity that is at the edge of perfection regarding brilliantly directed purpose. If even our hardships work an eternal glory in us that we cannot fully understand in the present moment, orchestrated, managed, and moderated by a loving and brilliantly wise God at the limits of perfection, this should bolster our faith and confidence when outward appearances seem close to hopeless.
The narrative stories of faith in the Bible tell us that God knows precisely what He is doing, dovetailed perfectly with the type and measure of purpose He has placed within us. Laws, rules, precepts, psalms of praise and encouragement, prophetic warnings, and historical events all occupy their place in the revelation of God to man. But the biblical narrative stories of faith demonstrate in action the will and ways of God within life-events to reveal His craftsmanship in the management of our journeys of faith and discovery.
What is astounding is that God is so brilliantly creative that He can compose a life-script for the perfect Son of God Jesus Christ, which actually contains an element of challenging difficulty. God knew that we would have difficulty with the second half of the cross that requires our self-in-charge nature to be set aside so that God can effectively work with us. Jesus says in Luke 12:50 “But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am straightened till it be accomplished!” (KJV), not because, like us, Jesus is in need of character growth through adversity. Jesus is already divinely perfect.
In Luke 22:44, it is recorded that Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane went back a second time to “pray more earnestly.” This is beyond our comprehension. We would normally assume that everything Jesus did, especially prayer, was perfect the first time. In Luke 22:42 Jesus prays “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” How can God be so brilliantly creative to be able to write into the earthly experience of the divine Son of God Jesus, the element of difficult challenge which is totally foreign to the perfect nature of God, just so He could tell us He personally understands our own difficulty in picking up our cross in order to follow God? Even within the absolute perfection of the ways and purposes of God, the life-script of Jesus manages to contain God-challenging elements of difficulty written-in for our future consolation and encouragement. This touches me at the capacity of my intellect and the depth of my heart.
It is the precise and intricate ways and purposes of God that enlists our own in-built facility for purpose, which can be integrated by God into any set of current life circumstances and events. Whether we are a heart surgeon, congresswoman, appellate court judge, school teacher, auto mechanic, pastor of a small-town church, writer of Christian books, or housewife raising children, God can overlay and integrate His higher ways and purposes into our lives if we will surrender and yield our self-wills to Him in faith and trust. The deliverance and salvation of God within the challenges of life, expressed so beautifully throughout the Psalms, takes place within the plans of God, and not our own. Innate purpose translates into reality at the highest most glorious level when orchestrated and directed within the framework of a God-composed journey of faith.
Sometimes purpose and worldly conventional normalcy do not mix. Sometimes we cannot have both the risk-filled pursuit of truth and the security of conventional normalcy simultaneously within the dynamics of this broken world. Jesus, the Lamb-of-God sacrifice for the sins of the world can only die and be resurrected if His generation rejects and crucifies Him. Only God can knit together a meaningful and purposeful tapestry of the commendable aspects of the Protestant work ethic with the worldly incomprehensible, biblical journey of faith through the cross of Calvary.
All of the people of faith in the Bible gave up some measure of worldly conventional normalcy in following God’s life-script for them. This separates out and elevates the quality of purpose and meaning into a higher zone that only God can orchestrate. This highlights the wisdom of God in the area of purpose, and like the scriptural example of God composing a life-script for Jesus that contained challenging difficulty for our consolation, it reveals an imaginative creativity that is at the edge of perfection regarding brilliantly directed purpose. If even our hardships work an eternal glory in us that we cannot fully understand in the present moment, orchestrated, managed, and moderated by a loving and brilliantly wise God at the limits of perfection, this should bolster our faith and confidence when outward appearances seem close to hopeless.
The narrative stories of faith in the Bible tell us that God knows precisely what He is doing, dovetailed perfectly with the type and measure of purpose He has placed within us. Laws, rules, precepts, psalms of praise and encouragement, prophetic warnings, and historical events all occupy their place in the revelation of God to man. But the biblical narrative stories of faith demonstrate in action the will and ways of God within life-events to reveal His craftsmanship in the management of our journeys of faith and discovery.
April 10, 2017
David
“For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” (2 Cor. 4:17)
From The Second Half of the Cross
The Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes of Jesus day were no longer the spiritual children of Abraham, because they held on to their self-will instead of submitting it to God. Like people of our own culture, they were afraid of the uncertainty of relinquishing their hold over the destiny of their lives into the trust of God’s care. Instead these Jerusalem leaders created their own form of religion based upon rules, regulations, and the performance of self-works rituals that replaced the living but more risky faith of submitting their lives to God.
We see this pattern throughout history in all man-invented, perfunctory religious experience. People will do almost anything to avoid having to give up their self-will to God, because deep down inside they are afraid. People are afraid to take the risk that God’s way might actually be better, because of the element of uncertainty of what God might do with their lives.
There is security in staying with what we know, rather than venturing out into a perilous journey of faith with Jesus Christ into the unknown. There is a sense of security in not letting go of the power we have over our own lives. This is the case, even when the recipient of this letting go of the power of self-sovereignty…Jesus Christ our Creator God…will lovingly re-direct this self-same power back down towards us in a more intelligently designed and beneficially purposed adventure-of-faith life-plan.
This is why many people have to reach the bottom depths of failure and suffering, to have nothing left to lose and nowhere else to go, before they will turn to God for His help. Sadly, Jesus Christ is often the last resort when He should be the first and most sensible beginning option in discovering our true purpose in life. That many people stubbornly hang on to their own self-in-control natures, to the ruin of themselves and often those around them, is one of the central, core problems with the human race.
David has to face Goliath in a life-and-death struggle at the beginning of David’s career, not because God sets up these types of contests for His own enjoyment, but because we must learn real faith and trust in God to see us through challenges when failure and falsification of God’s character are live possibilities. In a biblical quality journey of faith we sometimes barely make it through the tightest of choreographed and integrated circumstances because this is one way amongst several ways that God uses to authenticate His direct participation in our lives.
Miraculous or near-miraculous deliverance through supernaturally choreographed events is one tool in God’s tool-kit to separate His ways above worldly conventional normalcy. We see this repeated throughout the narrative stories of the Bible for an eternally valid reason. Without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6) because without a context of circumstances requiring committed faith in the face of discouraging appearances, God cannot reveal to us His very real presence in our lives in stark contrast to the subjective, humanistically generated false experience of self-works “religion.”
The story of David’s anointing by Samuel, and his calling, exploits, and tribulations in route to the kingship of Israel is not a man-invented myth because the component of the active participation of God in David’s story in beyond the reach of the creative imagination and invention of human writers. An adventure of faith like David’s is unique to the Bible.
David can write the 23rd Psalm because he actually followed God through the valley of the shadow of death. David learned first-hand that he did not have to fear evil, when God was with him.
Five of the most important words ever recorded in all of literature are: “for thou art with me” (Psalms 23:4). The contrast between the God-composed life of David, living on the knife’s edge of danger in faith and trust in God, and the self-led life in pursuit of security and self-preservation that will not venture out into the risky territory of faith in God, could not be greater.
The reward for David’s faith and trust is that he became Israel’s greatest king and fulfilled the purpose of his life (Psalms 139:14-18), and in doing so he came to personally know his Creator God.
From The Second Half of the Cross
The Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes of Jesus day were no longer the spiritual children of Abraham, because they held on to their self-will instead of submitting it to God. Like people of our own culture, they were afraid of the uncertainty of relinquishing their hold over the destiny of their lives into the trust of God’s care. Instead these Jerusalem leaders created their own form of religion based upon rules, regulations, and the performance of self-works rituals that replaced the living but more risky faith of submitting their lives to God.
We see this pattern throughout history in all man-invented, perfunctory religious experience. People will do almost anything to avoid having to give up their self-will to God, because deep down inside they are afraid. People are afraid to take the risk that God’s way might actually be better, because of the element of uncertainty of what God might do with their lives.
There is security in staying with what we know, rather than venturing out into a perilous journey of faith with Jesus Christ into the unknown. There is a sense of security in not letting go of the power we have over our own lives. This is the case, even when the recipient of this letting go of the power of self-sovereignty…Jesus Christ our Creator God…will lovingly re-direct this self-same power back down towards us in a more intelligently designed and beneficially purposed adventure-of-faith life-plan.
This is why many people have to reach the bottom depths of failure and suffering, to have nothing left to lose and nowhere else to go, before they will turn to God for His help. Sadly, Jesus Christ is often the last resort when He should be the first and most sensible beginning option in discovering our true purpose in life. That many people stubbornly hang on to their own self-in-control natures, to the ruin of themselves and often those around them, is one of the central, core problems with the human race.
David has to face Goliath in a life-and-death struggle at the beginning of David’s career, not because God sets up these types of contests for His own enjoyment, but because we must learn real faith and trust in God to see us through challenges when failure and falsification of God’s character are live possibilities. In a biblical quality journey of faith we sometimes barely make it through the tightest of choreographed and integrated circumstances because this is one way amongst several ways that God uses to authenticate His direct participation in our lives.
Miraculous or near-miraculous deliverance through supernaturally choreographed events is one tool in God’s tool-kit to separate His ways above worldly conventional normalcy. We see this repeated throughout the narrative stories of the Bible for an eternally valid reason. Without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6) because without a context of circumstances requiring committed faith in the face of discouraging appearances, God cannot reveal to us His very real presence in our lives in stark contrast to the subjective, humanistically generated false experience of self-works “religion.”
The story of David’s anointing by Samuel, and his calling, exploits, and tribulations in route to the kingship of Israel is not a man-invented myth because the component of the active participation of God in David’s story in beyond the reach of the creative imagination and invention of human writers. An adventure of faith like David’s is unique to the Bible.
David can write the 23rd Psalm because he actually followed God through the valley of the shadow of death. David learned first-hand that he did not have to fear evil, when God was with him.
Five of the most important words ever recorded in all of literature are: “for thou art with me” (Psalms 23:4). The contrast between the God-composed life of David, living on the knife’s edge of danger in faith and trust in God, and the self-led life in pursuit of security and self-preservation that will not venture out into the risky territory of faith in God, could not be greater.
The reward for David’s faith and trust is that he became Israel’s greatest king and fulfilled the purpose of his life (Psalms 139:14-18), and in doing so he came to personally know his Creator God.
March 27, 2017
The Cost of Following Jesus
In Luke 22:33 Peter says to Jesus: “Lord, I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death.” Jesus then famously answers: “I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shall thrice deny that thou knowest me” (Lk. 22:34).
But in addition Jesus could have answered Peter: “You will not in the long-term forsake me…but it will cost you something…it will cost you giving up doing things your way.”
Instead of prison and death for Peter at that time…the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were about to engineer the greatest event in all of human history…maybe the greatest in all of eternity…the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for the redemption of sinners willing to repent…that would procure for believers eternal life and liberation from the bondage to sin…far above any plans of Peter to protect Jesus from physical harm…no matter how commendable Peter’s intentions might be.
The higher plans of God simply displaced and swept away the contrary thinking of Peter regarding the humanly unacceptable disclosure of Jesus to the disciples that he would soon be arrested and killed…incomprehensible to Peter at the time…but clearly understood by Peter after his fall in the courtyard of Caiaphas, the crucifixion and resurrection, and Peter’s personal interview with the risen Christ.
God’s ways truly are higher than our ways (Isa. 55:8-9)…which is an affirmation within the life-scripts of the people of faith within scripture that the Bible has a divine origin…which as a spiritual reality cannot be duplicated as a counterfeit. Because the ways of God reside at the top-end of the vertical graph-line spectrum of goodness and light…the top part of absolute goodness and brilliant pure light that God exclusively owns…no humanistic writer could or would invent the huge gap between Peter’s lack of understanding that fateful night in the courtyard of Caiaphas…and God’s plans for the salvation for mankind.
On the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-16)…Jesus in essence says to Paul: “Yes, I will lead you into the all-truth of John 16:13 beyond what you could have imagined…but it will cost you something…it will cost giving up doing things your way.”
This is the narrow gate that the multitudes walk past and miss on their way to the destruction of unbelief and self-sovereignty.
This is the cross of Christ that people living within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking cannot see in the narrative stories of faith in the Bible.
This is another of the compelling arguments for the divine origin of the Bible.
But in addition Jesus could have answered Peter: “You will not in the long-term forsake me…but it will cost you something…it will cost you giving up doing things your way.”
Instead of prison and death for Peter at that time…the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were about to engineer the greatest event in all of human history…maybe the greatest in all of eternity…the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for the redemption of sinners willing to repent…that would procure for believers eternal life and liberation from the bondage to sin…far above any plans of Peter to protect Jesus from physical harm…no matter how commendable Peter’s intentions might be.
The higher plans of God simply displaced and swept away the contrary thinking of Peter regarding the humanly unacceptable disclosure of Jesus to the disciples that he would soon be arrested and killed…incomprehensible to Peter at the time…but clearly understood by Peter after his fall in the courtyard of Caiaphas, the crucifixion and resurrection, and Peter’s personal interview with the risen Christ.
God’s ways truly are higher than our ways (Isa. 55:8-9)…which is an affirmation within the life-scripts of the people of faith within scripture that the Bible has a divine origin…which as a spiritual reality cannot be duplicated as a counterfeit. Because the ways of God reside at the top-end of the vertical graph-line spectrum of goodness and light…the top part of absolute goodness and brilliant pure light that God exclusively owns…no humanistic writer could or would invent the huge gap between Peter’s lack of understanding that fateful night in the courtyard of Caiaphas…and God’s plans for the salvation for mankind.
On the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-16)…Jesus in essence says to Paul: “Yes, I will lead you into the all-truth of John 16:13 beyond what you could have imagined…but it will cost you something…it will cost giving up doing things your way.”
This is the narrow gate that the multitudes walk past and miss on their way to the destruction of unbelief and self-sovereignty.
This is the cross of Christ that people living within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking cannot see in the narrative stories of faith in the Bible.
This is another of the compelling arguments for the divine origin of the Bible.
God is Put to the Test
An authenticating test as to whether we are walking in a genuine adventure of faith composed by God is…who is being tested…God or ourselves.
If we are the ones on trial…if we are carrying the load…if it is our talents, abilities, and character that is being put to the test…there is a good chance that we are walking in the flesh…that we as Spirit-born Christians are still in self-sovereignty…that we are doing the best we can and as yet are unaware of biblical faith.
In every God-scripted journey of faith recorded in the Bible…the predominant question is not how well we can perform within our individual gifts and talents…but rather the question under examination centers around the reliability, truthfulness, and capacity of God to come through in the crisis…with a very minor component in each life-drama…consisting of our ability to release and maintain our faith as the challenge of the scenario progresses.
Without exception, this concept is patterned for us in every positive character of faith in the Bible…the cross of Christ and the subsequent resurrection three days later being the preeminent example of God’s competence and saving provision demonstrated through the initiation and performance of God’s higher ways (Isa. 55:8-9), even when we are not in control and do not have a full understanding of what is happening at the time.
What is sin?
This brings us to a fundamental question…what exactly is sin?
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden did not murder someone…did not rob a bank…did not embezzle money from a company…did not cheat on their taxes. Sin defined in the most general sense is to fall short of God’s intended purpose for our lives…to go our own way (Isa. 53:5-6) and not become who and what God created us to be.
Eating the forbidden fruit…from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…questioned the veracity of the word of God. In John 16:9 Jesus equates sin as unbelief…not believing in Him. Unbelief at its root…questions and doubts the motivations and trustworthiness of the character of our Creator God…our Father.
This is why entering into our God-composed journey of faith life-script for Spirit-born Christians is so important. Our God-scripted journey of faith not only redeems us to the fullest extent…preparing us for an eternity in the kingdom of God…but equally important redeems and vindicates the character of God and His unselfish love for us.
Jesus says in John 8:36 that if the Son makes us free…we will be free indeed. If we develop a personal relationship of trust with God in this current broken world environment…divinely crafted with events and circumstances unimaginable and unforeseeable by us…then we are safe…free indeed…from the debilitating rebellion of self-sovereignty and self-rulership within God’s kingdom forever.
No human writer could or would compose journeys of faith that put God to the test…from what possible frame of reference would anyone originate such a thing?
Genesis in the Bible starts out with highly sophisticated journey of faith themes that continue throughout the Bible all the way through the Book of Acts in the New Testament…themes of biblical faith that even today are outside of the reach or comprehension of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Jn. 15:18-27).
If we are the ones on trial…if we are carrying the load…if it is our talents, abilities, and character that is being put to the test…there is a good chance that we are walking in the flesh…that we as Spirit-born Christians are still in self-sovereignty…that we are doing the best we can and as yet are unaware of biblical faith.
In every God-scripted journey of faith recorded in the Bible…the predominant question is not how well we can perform within our individual gifts and talents…but rather the question under examination centers around the reliability, truthfulness, and capacity of God to come through in the crisis…with a very minor component in each life-drama…consisting of our ability to release and maintain our faith as the challenge of the scenario progresses.
Without exception, this concept is patterned for us in every positive character of faith in the Bible…the cross of Christ and the subsequent resurrection three days later being the preeminent example of God’s competence and saving provision demonstrated through the initiation and performance of God’s higher ways (Isa. 55:8-9), even when we are not in control and do not have a full understanding of what is happening at the time.
What is sin?
This brings us to a fundamental question…what exactly is sin?
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden did not murder someone…did not rob a bank…did not embezzle money from a company…did not cheat on their taxes. Sin defined in the most general sense is to fall short of God’s intended purpose for our lives…to go our own way (Isa. 53:5-6) and not become who and what God created us to be.
Eating the forbidden fruit…from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…questioned the veracity of the word of God. In John 16:9 Jesus equates sin as unbelief…not believing in Him. Unbelief at its root…questions and doubts the motivations and trustworthiness of the character of our Creator God…our Father.
This is why entering into our God-composed journey of faith life-script for Spirit-born Christians is so important. Our God-scripted journey of faith not only redeems us to the fullest extent…preparing us for an eternity in the kingdom of God…but equally important redeems and vindicates the character of God and His unselfish love for us.
Jesus says in John 8:36 that if the Son makes us free…we will be free indeed. If we develop a personal relationship of trust with God in this current broken world environment…divinely crafted with events and circumstances unimaginable and unforeseeable by us…then we are safe…free indeed…from the debilitating rebellion of self-sovereignty and self-rulership within God’s kingdom forever.
No human writer could or would compose journeys of faith that put God to the test…from what possible frame of reference would anyone originate such a thing?
Genesis in the Bible starts out with highly sophisticated journey of faith themes that continue throughout the Bible all the way through the Book of Acts in the New Testament…themes of biblical faith that even today are outside of the reach or comprehension of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Jn. 15:18-27).
The Callings of God are Unprecedented
When someone loves us…when someone encourages us…sees a specific talent within us…a parent, a grandfather or grandmother, a special uncle or aunt, brothers and sisters, a high school teacher or college professor, a pastor, or an athletic coach…and cares enough to the point of becoming involved and offering support in some way…this can motivate us to pursue this particular talent or gift for a lifetime.
There are many PhD’s who can point to a particular college professor who pointed out to them that they had talent in a particular subject and encouraged them to work hard in their studies. There are many professional athletes…some in halls of fame in their sport…who can point back to a particular coach as the mentor who recognized their athletic ability and pushed them hard towards achieving excellence. Concert orchestras are full of musicians who had a music teacher recognize early a talent they had on a particular musical instrument and encouraged them to practice hard and helped them develop a love for music.
In the biblical narrative stories of faith there is something unique and special. Above and outside of the talents and abilities that are recognizable by family, friends, and coaches or teachers, God calls people to do things that are beyond their imagination…beyond things they thought was possible. Only God can do this. This is another apologetic argument for the divine origin of the Bible.
Unlike a parent, friend, family member, teacher or coach…we cannot see God…yet we can talk to Him and He hears us…and we can hear Him in the Spirit.
The biblical narrative stories of faith are crafted specifically and individually to match the untapped potential of people using the divine foresight of our Creator God…in areas of capacity above and unrelated to our recognizable gifts in the areas of music, art, athletics, or scholarship that fall within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
The callings of God require qualities of faith and character that transcend above ou other innate abilities…in a way that is novel, unique, and non-existent in any other systems of thought or experience outside of the Bible.
The love of God that places supportive confidence in us…recognizing the higher way we are capable of pursuing within our God-composed journey of faith life-script…is a validating signature to the truthfulness of the God of the Bible and the importance of our individual callings and missions in life.
Abraham’s calling to go to Canaan was unprecedented. Joseph was going nowhere in Canaan and would have had a bleak future had God not intervened in a monumental way. David’s own father did not consider him as a viable candidate to become a future king. Jesus had faith in Peter during the upcoming challenge of faith of Christ’s rejection and crucifixion (Lk. 22:31-32). No one on the planet…outside of God…would have anticipated ahead of time and chosen Paul to become the premier missionary evangelist to the Greco-Roman world in the first century.
There are many PhD’s who can point to a particular college professor who pointed out to them that they had talent in a particular subject and encouraged them to work hard in their studies. There are many professional athletes…some in halls of fame in their sport…who can point back to a particular coach as the mentor who recognized their athletic ability and pushed them hard towards achieving excellence. Concert orchestras are full of musicians who had a music teacher recognize early a talent they had on a particular musical instrument and encouraged them to practice hard and helped them develop a love for music.
In the biblical narrative stories of faith there is something unique and special. Above and outside of the talents and abilities that are recognizable by family, friends, and coaches or teachers, God calls people to do things that are beyond their imagination…beyond things they thought was possible. Only God can do this. This is another apologetic argument for the divine origin of the Bible.
Unlike a parent, friend, family member, teacher or coach…we cannot see God…yet we can talk to Him and He hears us…and we can hear Him in the Spirit.
The biblical narrative stories of faith are crafted specifically and individually to match the untapped potential of people using the divine foresight of our Creator God…in areas of capacity above and unrelated to our recognizable gifts in the areas of music, art, athletics, or scholarship that fall within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
The callings of God require qualities of faith and character that transcend above ou other innate abilities…in a way that is novel, unique, and non-existent in any other systems of thought or experience outside of the Bible.
The love of God that places supportive confidence in us…recognizing the higher way we are capable of pursuing within our God-composed journey of faith life-script…is a validating signature to the truthfulness of the God of the Bible and the importance of our individual callings and missions in life.
Abraham’s calling to go to Canaan was unprecedented. Joseph was going nowhere in Canaan and would have had a bleak future had God not intervened in a monumental way. David’s own father did not consider him as a viable candidate to become a future king. Jesus had faith in Peter during the upcoming challenge of faith of Christ’s rejection and crucifixion (Lk. 22:31-32). No one on the planet…outside of God…would have anticipated ahead of time and chosen Paul to become the premier missionary evangelist to the Greco-Roman world in the first century.
David
The worldly, self-directed approach is to “get ahead” and stay ahead of life’s adversities through education, hard work, strength of personality, family wealth, and any other method at our disposal. The goal is to achieve the “good life” as defined by worldly horizontal thinking…through material wealth, security, and self-validation. In actuality this life approach is based in part upon this broken world’s fear of the uncertainty regarding our self-worth and the whims of chance. The go-it-on-our-own, self-validation approach to life is based upon the need to avoid the outward appearance of negative failure.
The love, forgiveness, and acceptance of God through Christ sets up a new life reality and context, whereby the Spirit-born Christian is free to enter into the risky venture of a journey of faith following God wherever He leads…even into the valley of the shadow of death like David. The adventure of faith component in David’s life refutes the modern cultural misconception that real men do not rely upon God as a “crutch.”
The limited mindset of worldly horizontal thinking, stuck in the self-on-the-throne mentality, makes it difficult for God to break into our lives and straighten us out using a better life-script. The self-directed life is Lucifer’s subtly deceptive counterfeit to the more daring release-of-faith “narrow way” that Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:13-14). Seeking material wealth and personal acclaim as the means to validate our self-worth is the inverse opposite of “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). If we mistakenly think we have everything perfectly arranged financially and socially, we will also mistakenly think we have no need for God. An autonomous journey-of-self automatically pushes aside a journey of faith in fellowship with God, because we cannot live two opposing lives at the same time.
Is entirely self-controlling our destiny the underlying purpose of life? How is it that we would even independently know the real purpose of this short-in-length life for us? Is it written in stone somewhere? Is the purpose of life capably passed down to us from our parents and grandparents? Are we born into a world where the life-examples of the experienced adults around us clearly demonstrate the best approach to life (1 Peter 1:18)? Judging by the chaotic, universally repetitive trial-and-error world around us, mankind in general has no idea what is the true purpose of our being here. One of the basic questions, which people pause to think about during some period in their busy lives, even people with economic and social stability, is: “why am I here?”
Absent specific knowledge of our purpose in life, people in our modern culture who do not personally know God through an intimate walk of faith, vote with their self-will and their pocketbooks to choose the default, conventional, pleasure-driven, self-centered, spiritually risk-averse, and worldly predictable road. How many people do we personally know, or read about in fiction novels, or watch in movies, who listen to God in the Spirit, subordinate their self-wills, and follow the life-plan that God could and would reveal to them as the optimum course of action? This approach does not exist in our popular culture because it involves surrendering all to Jesus Christ, because it involves the second half of the cross.
The worldly conventional life-approach has no faith or trust in God, but instead has faith and trust in ourselves. The type of risk, danger, and adventure that comes from faith and trust in the living God, who can compose and orchestrate a brilliantly creative life like David’s divinely planned and executed ascent to the kingship of Israel, does not exist in a God-less cultural environment.
The love, forgiveness, and acceptance of God through Christ sets up a new life reality and context, whereby the Spirit-born Christian is free to enter into the risky venture of a journey of faith following God wherever He leads…even into the valley of the shadow of death like David. The adventure of faith component in David’s life refutes the modern cultural misconception that real men do not rely upon God as a “crutch.”
The limited mindset of worldly horizontal thinking, stuck in the self-on-the-throne mentality, makes it difficult for God to break into our lives and straighten us out using a better life-script. The self-directed life is Lucifer’s subtly deceptive counterfeit to the more daring release-of-faith “narrow way” that Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:13-14). Seeking material wealth and personal acclaim as the means to validate our self-worth is the inverse opposite of “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). If we mistakenly think we have everything perfectly arranged financially and socially, we will also mistakenly think we have no need for God. An autonomous journey-of-self automatically pushes aside a journey of faith in fellowship with God, because we cannot live two opposing lives at the same time.
Is entirely self-controlling our destiny the underlying purpose of life? How is it that we would even independently know the real purpose of this short-in-length life for us? Is it written in stone somewhere? Is the purpose of life capably passed down to us from our parents and grandparents? Are we born into a world where the life-examples of the experienced adults around us clearly demonstrate the best approach to life (1 Peter 1:18)? Judging by the chaotic, universally repetitive trial-and-error world around us, mankind in general has no idea what is the true purpose of our being here. One of the basic questions, which people pause to think about during some period in their busy lives, even people with economic and social stability, is: “why am I here?”
Absent specific knowledge of our purpose in life, people in our modern culture who do not personally know God through an intimate walk of faith, vote with their self-will and their pocketbooks to choose the default, conventional, pleasure-driven, self-centered, spiritually risk-averse, and worldly predictable road. How many people do we personally know, or read about in fiction novels, or watch in movies, who listen to God in the Spirit, subordinate their self-wills, and follow the life-plan that God could and would reveal to them as the optimum course of action? This approach does not exist in our popular culture because it involves surrendering all to Jesus Christ, because it involves the second half of the cross.
The worldly conventional life-approach has no faith or trust in God, but instead has faith and trust in ourselves. The type of risk, danger, and adventure that comes from faith and trust in the living God, who can compose and orchestrate a brilliantly creative life like David’s divinely planned and executed ascent to the kingship of Israel, does not exist in a God-less cultural environment.
