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July 14 - July 29, 2019
On the Cross we see God doing at the cosmic level what we all have to do when we forgive. There God absorbed the punishment and debt for sin himself. He paid it so we did not have to.
The idol of success cannot be just expelled, it must be replaced.
How can we break our heart’s fixation on doing “some great thing” in order to heal ourselves of our sense of inadequacy, in order to give our lives meaning? Only when we see what Jesus, our great Suffering Servant, has done for us will we finally understand why God’s salvation does not require us to do “some great thing.”
when we are moved by what he did for us in our hearts, it begins to kill off the addiction, the need for success at all costs.
The answer came not from the palace, but from the slave quarters!
Jesus served humbly and then was tortured and killed.
Jesus’s salvation is received not through strength but through the admission of weakness and need. And Jesus’s salvation was achieved not through strength but through surrender, service, sacrifice, and death.
This is one of the great messages of the Bible: God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong, the foolish and despised things to shame the wise, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are (1 Corinthians 1:29-31). That’s how God does it.
When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life.
We can also look to politics. We can look upon our political leaders as “messiahs,” our political policies as saving doctrine, and turn our political activism into a kind of religion.
fear
They believe that if their policies and people are not in power, everything will fall apart.
opponents are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil.
The Bible is unique in its uncompromising rejection of all attempts to . . . identify part of creation as either the villain or the savior.66
This accounts for the constant political cycles of overblown hopes and disillusionment, for the increasingly poisonous political discourse, and for the disproportionate fear and despair when one’s political party loses power. But why do we deify and demonize political causes and ideas? Reinhold Niebuhr answered that, in political idolatry, we make a god out of having power.
The original temptation in the Garden of Eden was to resent the limits God had put on us (“You shall not eat of the tree. . . .”; Genesis 2:17) and to seek to be “as God” by taking power over our own destiny. We gave in to this temptation and now it is part of our nature.
Rather than accept our finitude and dependence on God, we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives. But this is an illusion.
the end indiscriminately justifies every means. . . . Thus a nation’s goal of material prosperity becomes an idol when we use it to justify the destruction of the natural environment or allow the abuse of individuals or classes of people.
75 It is too early to be sure, but it may be that in light of the massive financial crisis of 2008-2009, the same disaffection with capitalism may occur that happened to socialism a generation before.
In short, ideologues cannot admit that there are always significant negative side-effects to any political program. They cannot grant that their opponents have good ideas too.
However, even if fear is not a reason for seeking power, it almost always comes with having it.
Power, then, is often born of fear and in turn gives birth to more fear.
Powerful people do not like to admit how weak they really feel.
In short, all we are and have is given to us by God. We are not infinite Creators, but finite, dependent creatures.
Eventually it became clear that his meaning and value had not shifted to Christ, but was still based in having power over others.
The reason he wanted to be in Christian ministry was not because he was attracted to serving God and others, but to the power of knowing he was right, that he had the truth.
Idols of power, then, are not only for the powerful. You can pursue power in small, petty ways, by becoming a local neighborhood bully or a low-level bureaucrat who bosses around the few people in his field of authority. Power idolatry is all around us. What is the cure?
In contrast to the rest of the materials in the statue it was “cut out, not by human hands.” It was from God. Though the stone was less valuable than any of the metals in the statue, it was ultimately the most powerful component. It was, as Daniel says, God’s kingdom (Verse 44) that would someday be set up on the earth.
The dream was a call to humility.
Those in power should see that they have not achieved power but have only been given it by God,
much of our addiction to power and control is due to false conceptions of God.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers is filled with case studies that demonstrate how our success is largely the product of our environment.
Most of the forces that make us who we are lie in the hand of God.
Nebuchadnezzar had taken personal credit for his rise to prominence. Now he began to be humbled, and his false views of God began to change, but the changes didn’t go very deep. More intervention by God would be necessary.
God was not after retribution, vengeance, or destruction. This was discipline—pain inflicted with the motive of correction and redemption.
“The Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes and sets over them the lowliest of men.” This means that anyone who is successful is simply a recipient of God’s unmerited favor. Even the people at the top of the world’s hierarchy of power, wealth, and influence are really “lowliest”—they are no better than anyone else. This is a rudimentary form of the gospel—that what we have is the result of grace, not of our “works” or efforts.
If you knew that, you would be both more relaxed and secure and more humble and just.
Because he thought like a dragon, he had become a dragon. When we set our hearts on power, we become hardened predators. We become like what we worship.94
pride leads to death, to breakdown, to a loss of humanity. But if you let it humble you rather than embitter you, and turn to God instead of living for your own glory, then the death of your pride can lead to a resurrection. You can emerge, finally, fully human, with a tender heart instead of a hard heart.
So if like Eustace, Nebuchadnezzar, and Jesus you fall into great weakness, but say, “Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46), there will be growth, a change, and a resurrection.
But Jesus shows us another way. By giving up his power and serving, he became the most influential man who ever lived.
Only by admitting our sin, need, and powerlessness, and by casting ourselves on his mercy, will we finally become secure in his love, and therefore empowered in a way that does not lead us to oppress others.
The insecurity is gone, the lust for power is cut at the root. As a preacher once said, “The way up is to go ...
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There are others, however, that influence us but are more hidden. They are not the idols of our heart, but of our culture and society.
“That all this debt she was putting together like a puzzle and selling to investors would play such a sinister role in the downfall of the economy didn’t occur to her—although it probably should have.”
Now life is about creating a self through the maximization of individual freedom from the constraints of community.
Now we see the complexity of what shapes and drives us. Any dominant cultural “Hope” that is not God himself is a counterfeit god.
Western, secular cultures make an idol out of individual freedom, and this leads to the breakdown of the family, rampant materialism, careerism, and the idolization of romantic love, physical beauty, and profit.
How can we be less enslaved by our cultural idols?
The answer to our cultural problem must be more religion, right? Not necessarily.
