C.H. Cobb's Blog, page 19

And a little more Tozer!

Lost in today’s religious world is the radical antithesis between the redeemed and the unregenerate. “Coming to church” has become the test of faith, rather than joyful belief in and submission to the pure, unadulterated message of the Gospel. But “coming to church” is a duty attended to by all the world’s religions, and no more makes one a Christian than a visit to a clinic makes one a medical doctor.
Christianity is first and last a relationship with a real, living Person—Jesus Christ, a relationship possible only when one has been regenerated, brought from a state of spiritual death to life. It is not wrapped up in the confession of a concept, the reciting of a creed, the joining of a church, or warm religious feelings. Jesus Christ is the Living God—which means He actually exists as a real person, a thinking, choosing, volitional, emotional Being. He exists wholly independently from creation, from people, from human consciousness. He was before all things, and by Him all things exist.
Any religious sensibility that names Jesus and confesses to love and admire Him yet falls short of a genuine redemptive relationship with Him as a real, living Person is in no way Christian. Tozer’s comments on this sort of “Christianity”—which is essentially unchanged by an encounter with Christ and feels equally comfortable with the world and the Church—are helpful.

It is no more than a religious platitude to say that the trouble with us today is that we have tried to bridge the gulf between two opposites, the world and the Church, and have performed an illicit marriage for which there is no biblical authority. Actually no real union between the world and the Church is possible. When the Church joins up with the world it is the true Church no longer but only a pitiful hybrid thing, an object of smiling contempt to the world and an abomination to the Lord.
The twilight in which many (or should we say most?) believers walk today is not caused by any vagueness on the part of the Bible. Nothing could be clearer than the pronouncements of the Scriptures on the Christian’s relation to the world. The confusion which gathers around this matter results from the unwillingness of professing Christians to take the Word of the Lord seriously. Christianity is so entangled with the world that millions never guess how radically they have missed the New Testament pattern. Compromise is everywhere. The world is whitewashed just enough to pass inspection by blind men posing as believers, and those same believers are everlastingly seeking to gain acceptance with the world. By mutual concessions men who call themselves Christians manage to get on with men who have for the things of God nothing but quiet contempt.
This whole thing is spiritual in its essence. A Christian is what he is not by ecclesiastical manipulation but by the new birth. He is a Christian because of a Spirit which dwells in him. Only that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. The flesh can never be converted into spirit, no matter how many church dignitaries work on it. Confirmation, baptism, holy communion, confession of faith—none of these nor all of them together can turn flesh into spirit nor make a son of Adam a son of God [Tozer, ThePursuit of Man, pp 115-7].

More Tozer

The true Christian has a passion and love for truth, and feels not at all uncomfortable with the imperialistic, exclusive nature of truth. And yet if that passion for truth is not regulated by warm love for our neighbor, we are to the lost but frowning, bitter advocates of something the world finds to be foolish. Truth riding on the crest of love is appealing, but mired in the muck of pride it can be disgusting. In the nature of God these two great forces are never in tension: "Lovingkindness and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other" (Ps. 85:10). Not so in man. If we are not trained by humility, we will attempt to wield truth as a battering ram with which we try to bludgeon our neighbors, our children, and our spouse into submission.

As Tozer focuses on the Holy Spirit in the last third of his book, The Pursuit of Man , he speaks about love and truth:

The blight of the Pharisee's heart in olden times was doctrine without love. With the teachings of the Pharisees Christ had little quarrel, but with the pharisaic spirit He carried on unceasing warfare to the end. It was religion that put Christ on the cross, religion without the indwelling Spirit. It is no use to deny that Christ was crucified by persons who today would be called fundamentalists. This should prove most disquieting if not downright distressing to us who pride ourselves on our orthodoxy. An unblessed soul filled with the letter of truth may actually be worse off than a pagan kneeling before a fetish. We are safe only when the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, only when our intellects are indwelt by the loving Fire that came at Pentecost. For the Holy Spirit is not a luxury, not something added now and again to produce a deluxe type of Christian once in a generation. No, He is for every child of God a vital necessity, and that He fill and indwell His people is more than a languid hope. It is rather an inescapable imperative [A. W. Tozer, 106].

Nowhere is this human, fallen, and wholly unnecessary contradiction between love and truth seen so clearly as in our communications on the Internet. Our flame wars do little more than demonstrate how little the truth has changed us, and I am as guilty as the next. We are like the sons of thunder, who in the face of rejection asked Jesus, "Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" (Luke 9:54). Jesus' response to James and John is one we still need to heed today: "But He turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:55-56, while there is a textual issue with His precise words, there is none with the fact of His rebuke).

May God invade us with His Holy Spirit, that our stand for truth would be unyielding but bathed in warm-hearted love and respect for those who do not yet know the Truth, Whom to know aright is life eternal.

Tozer: Victory through defeat

On Facebook I've been posting excerpts from A. W. Tozer's The Pursuit of Man . I'm continuing that series here. The following is from chapter 4: Victory through Defeat. Tozer's basic point in this chapter is that we must be conquered by the cross and know death thereon, before we can truly know life.

We might well pray for God to invade and conquer us, for until He does we remain in peril from a thousand foes. We bear within us the seeds of our own disintegration. Our moral imprudence puts us always in danger of accidental or reckless self-destruction. The strength of our flesh is an ever present danger to our souls. Deliverance can come to us only by the defeat of our old life. Safety and peace come only after we have been forced to our knees. God rescues us by breaking us, by shattering our strength and wiping out our resistance. Then He invades our natures with that ancient and eternal life which is from the beginning. So He conquers us and by that benign conquest saves us for Himself.

With this open secret awaiting easy discovery, why do we in almost all our busy activities work in another direction from this? Why do we build our churches on human flesh? Why do we set such store by that which the Lord has long ago repudiated and despise those things which God holds in such high esteem? For we teach men not to die with Christ but to live in the strength of their dying manhood. We boast not in our weakness but in our strength. Values which Christ has declared to be false are brought back into evangelical favor and promoted as the very life and substance of the Christian way. How eagerly do we seek the approval of this or that man of worldly reputation. How shamefully do we exploit the converted celebrity. Anyone will do to take away the reproach of obscurity from our publicity-hungry leaders: famous athletes, congressmen, world travelers, rich industrialists; before such we bow with obsequious smiles and honor them in our public meetings and in the religious press. Thus we glorify men to enhance the standing of the Church of God, and the glory of the Prince of Life is made to hang upon the transient fame of a man who shall die. . . .

. . . The loss, the rejection, the shame, both belong to Christ and to all who in very truth are His. The cross that saves them also slays them them, and anything short of this is pseudo-faith and not true faith at all. . . . How can we face Him who was crucified and slain when we see His followers accepted and praised? . . .

. . . [I]f I see aright, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is, rather, a bright new ornament upon the bosom of self-assured and carnal Christianity whose hands are indeed the hands of Abel, but whose voice is the voice of Cain. The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter. The flesh, smiling and confident, preaches and sings about the cross; before the cross it bows  and toward the cross it points with carefully staged histrionics--but upon that cross it will not die, and the reproach of that cross it stubbornly refuses to bear. . . .

. . . The life that halts short of the cross is but a fugitive and condemned thing, doomed at last to be beyond recovery. That life which goes to the cross and loses itself there to rise again with Christ is a divine and breathless treasure. Over it death hath no more dominion. . . .

Our President

President Obama stumbles from scandal to crisis. The unifying theme is that each is self-inflicted. The high-flying rhetoric is freighted with too much duplicity to get airborne. The hubris has come home to roost. Mocked abroad, distrusted at home, a disappointment to his supporters, a lawless Chicago con to his detractors, there's not a great deal he can do for an encore.

He is, in my opinion, a clear and present danger to our constitutional republic. Under Obama we have lost the rule of law and transitioned to the rule of something that bears more resemblence to a monarchy (to put the best light on it) than that of a chief executive beholden to a constitution and a tripartite division of federal power. Under Obama, the federal government now has a collective integrity that approximates something between pre-Katrina Louisiana and New Jersey.

The Justice Department has become the chief threat to justice, the EPA is a regulatory monster, the Education Department is the main obstacle to providing a real education in our schools (okay, hold the phone on that charge, that's been true in every administration), the IRS has been transformed into a political club with which to beat opponents of the President, the NSA has all the trappings of the prelude to a police state, and the Constitution has become the deadest "living document" you can imagine. And that's not even mentioning the confusion, uncertainty, and destruction he has wrought on American healthcare, nor the devastation his policies have worked on our economy. I suppose that the one thing I can say about him is that he is quite thorough.

And now he's driven his golf-cart into a box canyon called Syria, and there's no way out. As Victor Davis Hanson says, he has no good options. Some men make history by their leadership through the crises of their times. President Obama is about to make history, but unfortunately it will not be skilled leadership for which he will be remembered.

Book Review: The Facts on Roman Catholicism

John Ankerberg's The Facts on Roman Catholicism , is part of Ankerberg’s series on various religions and religious topics. It is very readable, very brief (86 pages of text, not including footnotes), and very well documented. The bad reviews it receives on Amazon are primarily from Catholics, who object to--and in some cases, demonstrate--the points that Ankerberg makes.
Ankerberg compares and contrasts the Bible and the official beliefs of Roman Catholicism in five sections: Divine Revelation and Authority, Introduction to Roman Catholicism, Salvation and Justification, the Roles of the Bible, the Pope, and Mary, and a Conclusion.
In each section, Ankerberg cites official Roman Catholic documents to establish the Catholic position, and then compares it to the Bible. Central to his argument, especially the section on Justification, is the charge that while Protestants and Catholics share the the same terminology—such as “justification”—what they mean by those terms is entirely different. Ankerberg clearly shows that the Catholic notion of salvation is wrapped up in works and personal (albeit, “infused”) righteousness.
This is a good, brief resource for those seeking clarification about Catholic beliefs, especially as they contrast with biblical teaching.

Book Review: When a Nation Forgets God

Erwin Lutzer’s When a Nation Forgets God: 7 Lessons We Must Learn from Nazi Germany is a book whose time has come. Lutzer combines painstaking research detailing Germany’s tortured path to National Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s with biblical insight, producing a clarion call for faithfulness addressed to today’s church. In each chapter he traces the cynical machinations of Hitler’s Nazis and the failure of Germany’s Christians, and then brings the lessons learned to bear on modern-day American Christianity.
The first major lesson has to do with what happens when God is separated from government. When a nation scrubs clean from its market places, courthouses, and legislatures any references to God and His rule, judgment inevitably follows. It might not be the immediate judgment of some cataclysm, it may be condemnation to a slow, inevitable decay but nonetheless, divine wrath follows.
The second lesson concerns the economy. Lutzer shows that when economic disaster strikes, whether through manipulation or unintended events, a nation will trade freedom for economic safety even if it means accepting totalitarian control. Germany’s roller-coaster economy in the 20s and 30s left the people ready for a dictator.
The third major lesson reveals the consequence of eliminating God as the ultimate source of law. Lutzer pursues the telling adage, show me your source of law, and I’ll show you your gods. He demonstrates that when the principle of law is unhooked from belief in a divine lawgiver who sits in ultimate judgment over mankind, all hell breaks loose in a society.
Fourth, the power of propaganda is exposed. Lutzer explains Hitler’s penchant for big lies as opposed to small ones, and shows how a society can be conditioned to accept the most outrageous propositions as truth. Through media, through setting the terms and tone of a national conversation, through the promise of acceptance and approbation combined with the threat of mockery and scorn (and worse), the German people were transformed from a normal nation into one that perpetrated horrors unspeakable.
Compulsory public education was another major channel through which the primacy of National Socialism was inculcated into German society. The author exposes the methods (and goals) of secular “Values Clarification” and demonstrates that this methodology is the dominant feature in American public education. He who controls the education of children controls the future.
In chapter six Lutzer lays down a positive lesson: people make a difference. He speculates that history might have been different had German pastors and Christians stood firm against the secular darkness of that era. The writer shares stories of Christians who have made a difference in their time, even at great cost to themselves, and he calls on the church to once again be such a witness.
Finally Lutzer challenges the modern church to exalt the cross in the gathering darkness. The gospel message must not be confused, diluted, or corrupted with a false message of prosperity, psychological comfort, or even good causes. We must preach the cross and live the suffering to which it calls us, keeping our eyes upon Christ.
If I have any criticism of this book, it is a mystifying failure of Lutzer in chapter three. The chapter is an exposition of its title: “That which is legal might also be evil.” After tracing the changes in law in Nazi Germany that made possible its pograms, Lutzer looks at America and finds two flaws that have weakened the impact of Christianity on American law. He cites the onset of evolution and theological liberalism and makes a good case for the destructive tendencies of both. But nowhere does he even mention American Christianity’s acceptance of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There was probably no greater damage done to the influence and credibility of the church than its failure to stand against the scourge of human slavery. Like Nazi Germany, many of the arguments made in favor of slavery centered around the question of whether African blacks were subhuman. As I was reading this chapter I was expecting Lutzer to say something, anything, by way of critique on this subject. If he said it, I missed it. It is a crucial failure that ought to be corrected in the next edition.
That criticism notwithstanding, this book combines three great qualities: first, it is firmly anchored with excellent research in a faithful representation of both history and the modern day. Second, the insights it contains are profound and thoroughly biblical. Third, it is brief and accessible. Every person concerned about the direction of our nation, and our churches, should read this outstanding book.

Life-verse Number Three

Jeremiah 45:5 “‘But you, are you seeking great things for yourself? Do not seek them; for behold, I am going to bring disaster on all flesh,’ declares the Lord, ‘but I will give your life to you as booty in all the places where you may go.’”
This verse requires a bit of context. The prophet Jeremiah had a secretary named Baruch. The technical, scholarly term is “amanuensis” - you can use it to impress your friends and neighbors, but it means, essentially, “secretary.” An amanuensis was one who would record what another said or dictated (think, court recorder).
Baruch is the one who actually wrote the scroll of Jeremiah, as Jeremiah dictated it to him. Jeremiah the prophet was persona non grata in the royal court of Judah, because his prophecies were condemning the Judean kingdom for their sins as the clock ran down on the southern kingdom. Since Baruch was associated with the hated prophet, he shared in the abuse and contempt. It could not have been pleasant to be hated by your own people while the barbarians were at the gates (actually, it was the Babylonians).
At some low point for the scribe, God gave to Jeremiah a word of encouragement for Baruch, with a promise. “Drop your personal ambitions and dreams of greatness, Baruch. It’s not an appropriate time for that. Instead, I will give you your life as a prize.”
This is for me both a rebuke and a comfort. When I was a young believer, I had dreams and ambitions of “what I would do for God.” Like most ambitions, mine were sullied with prideful desires for personal greatness. Needless to say, my great ambitions did not pan out. And it’s a good thing, too. I already struggle too much with personal pride. Visual success would simply be more than I could handle. God is so gracious.

This promise to Baruch is mine. Christ has given me my life, in that He has saved me and provided me with eternal life. By His good grace, my path has followed His course for me, not my own. Those dreams didn’t pan out, but they were more for me than for Christ. It’s been a far better path than I would have chosen. This is my life verse for the latter portion of my life as a believer, and it is a good one—a blessing.
Are you seeking great things for yourself? Don’t, Christian. God has given you your life as a prize, instead. What He has for you is far better than what you would have chosen for yourself.

Bye-bye Barnes and Noble!

Rats! After struggling for several hours with the Nook platform, I regret to say that I am abandoning the Barnes and Noble NOOK. However - if you have a NOOK, and want a copy of one of my books, be sure to read to the end of this post. As always, Kindle copies are available on Amazon.

Two reasons why I am ditching the B&N platform.

#1, When I look at my book on the Nook for PC it looks perfect. When I look at it on the Nook Previewer on the author site, it looks terrible. C'mon, B&N! Both of these viewers are your software! Get your act together!

#2, There is currently a maelstrom of discontent among Nook authors. B&N is messing around with the Nook author's site (transfering everything from PubIt! to NOOK Press). It is a fiasco.

As an independent author who holds down a full-time job, I want to spend my discretionary time WRITING not playing with the bits and the bytes, or xhtml.

If you have a Nook, and you want to read one of my books, use the contact form on my web site and I'll be glad to email you the file directly. If it works on your Nook, you can pay me. If it doesn't, delete the file and we won't worry about it.

Life-verse Number Two

Jeremiah 9:23-24 says:

Thus says the Lord, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the Lord.

I love this passage. Somewhere along the line in my earliest days as a believer in Christ, I was reading Jeremiah and these two verses jumped out and grabbed me and carried me around the room a couple times. This is my life-verse.
I am one prone to boast. When I tend to be inflated with pride—puffed up, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8:1—this passage calls me back, plants my feet on the ground. There is but One of whom to boast—and it’s not me. I will boast of Christ, that by His divine sovereign election I know Him. I will boast of Christ, that by His grace and mercy I know and love His Word. Apart from Christ I would be deaf to His Word and blind to His glory. Apart from Christ I would remain spiritually dead and headed for an inexorable judgment. Apart from Christ the gospel would be foolishness to me, and the ways of the world, wisdom.
When I sign my name, I often add the reference “Je 9:23-24.” When I was at Westminster, some of my instructors took exception to my using that text. They knew my background (fundamentalist), and thought I was staking out some sort of anti-intellectual position. I can understand why they might have thought that: the fundamentalist movement has often fallen prey to that self-defeating and biblically foolish position.
But my use of Jeremiah has never been a statement of that sort. It’s not a rebuke for someone else: it is a reminder for me: I have nothing of which to boast—except Christ, whom to know aright is life eternal. In Him, of Him, I will boast.

This one's for you, dad.

  The following is taken from the dedication page of my new novel, Falcon Down . I thought I'd put it on my blog for Father's Day.Dedication
In memory of Cdr. Lewis Milner Cobb, USN (Ret.)
In every generation there are those men and women who simply do what needs to be done, even at great risk to themselves. My dad was one of those men. He was pursuing an engineering degree at Georgia Tech when World War II reprogrammed his future. Dad joined the Navy and became a fighter pilot, flying Grumman Hellcats off the pitching decks of carriers in the Pacific. He married mom in August, 1945, expecting to return to the Pacific for his third tour after their honeymoon, but by the time their honeymoon was over the war had ended. He stayed in the Navy, eventually retiring as a commander in 1966. From there he went into the Episcopal ministry, still serving people, but in a different way.

He died a couple of years ago. He was faithful to his wife, his family, and his country: a good man, with a life well-lived. He was a great father. This one’s for you, dad.