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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Copan
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December 4 - December 16, 2022
Pride, we know, is an inflated view of ourselves—a false advertising campaign promoting ourselves because we suspect that others won’t accept who we really are.2 Pride is actually a lie about our own identity or achievements. To be proud is to live in a world propped up with falsehoods about ourselves, taking credit where credit isn’t due.
What then is humility? This involves having a realistic assessment of ourselves—our weaknesses and strengths.
True humility doesn’t deny abilities but rather acknowledges God as the source of these gifts, for which we can’t take credit. What do we have that we didn’t receive (1 Cor. 4:7)? To be humble is to know our proper place before God—with all of our strengths and weaknesses.
Well, then, is God proud? No, he has a realistic view of himself, not a false or exaggerated one. God, by definition, is the greatest conceivable being, which makes him worthy of worship.
Now, if God truly exists, then worship turns out to be moral, spiritual creatures getting in touch with reality.
Why does God insist that we worship him? For the same reason that parents tell their young children to stay away from fire or speeding cars. God doesn’t want humans to detach themselves from ultimate reality, which only ends up harming us.
Jealousy can be a bad thing or a good thing. It’s bad to protect the petty; it’s good to fiercely guard the precious. If jealousy is rooted in self-centeredness, it is clearly the wrong kind of jealousy. A jealousy that springs from concern for another’s well-being, however, is appropriate.
Critics like the New Atheists tend to create a false dichotomy between God’s gracious rule and human well-being, as though these are opposed to each other.
However, if we see God’s activity and human nature as harmonious rather than in conflict, a new perspective dawns on us. When God’s intentions for us are realized and when we’re alert to the divinely given boundaries built into our nature and the world around us, we human beings flourish—that is, we enjoy loving, trusting relationships with God and one another because we’re living out the design-plan.
Instead of telling them they are sinning because they are sleeping with their girlfriends or boyfriends, I tell them that they are sinning because they are looking to their romances to give their lives meaning, to justify and save them, to give them what they should be looking for from God. This idolatry leads to anxiety, obsessiveness, envy, and resentment. I have found that when you describe their lives in terms of idolatry, postmodern people do not give much resistance. Then Christ and his salvation can be presented not (at this point) so much as their only hope for forgiveness, but as
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When we apply this to God’s jealousy, we can say that it’s aroused not just to protect a relationship. God seeks to protect his creatures from profound self-harm. We can deeply damage ourselves by running after gods made in our own image. God’s jealousy is other-centered. As we saw with God’s humility, divine jealousy reacts to the human denial that God is God, to the false idea that a relationship with him isn’t really needed for ultimate human well-being (John 10:10).
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
In all of these ways, we see God’s faithful tenderness cushioning the startling harshness of God’s command. It’s as though God is saying to Abraham, “I’m testing your obedience and allegiance. You don’t understand, but in light of all I’ve done and said to you, trust me. Not even death can nullify the promise I’ve made.”
This picture expresses what one scholar calls the grace-gratitude ideal: “This is what God has done for you. Therefore, out of gratitude you should do the same for others.”
God’s choosing Israel was not an end in itself but a means of blessing all the nations.
Remember Moses’s sweeping commands to “consume” and “utterly destroy” the Canaanites, not to “leave alive anything that breathes”? Joshua’s comprehensive language echoes that of Moses; Scripture clearly indicates that Joshua fulfilled Moses’s charge to him. So if Joshua did just as Moses commanded, and if Joshua’s described destruction was really hyperbole common in ancient Near Eastern warfare language and familiar to Moses, then clearly Moses himself didn’t intend a literal, comprehensive Canaanite destruction. He, like Joshua, was merely following the literary convention of the day.
Thumbs up herfra!
I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being
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It would be a strange, defective God who didn’t pose a serious cosmic authority problem for humans. Part of the status of being God, after all, is that God has a unique authority, or lordship, over humans. Since we humans aren’t God, the true God would have authority over us and would seek to correct our profoundly selfish ways.14
If we take God seriously, he will most certainly mess up our lives, make us uncomfortable, and even disorient us.
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No doubt, children may draw all sorts of faulty conclusions about their “immoral” parents simply because they don’t understand what their parents are doing. Parents, in order to train their children, may seem overly strict when they insist that kids apologize even when they don’t feel like it. Parents may appear tyrannical when they override the freedom of a child who happens to be making all the wrong decisions about friendships or dubious activities. Parents may do things that strike their young children as utterly out of character or even immoral, yet the problem will be resolved with
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Even non-Westerners have come to recognize the remarkable impact of the Christian faith in the West. Time magazine’s well-respected correspondent David Aikman reported the summary of one Chinese scholar’s lecture to a group of eighteen American tourists: “One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it
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If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them—if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it’s going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim—and that is that this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving, and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them.
