To Make One Wise

How long that couple dwelt in Paradise

Before the serpent tempted Eve to sin

Cannot be known, yet surely, in their eyes

That Tree of Knowledge sought their hearts to win.

The Good they knew so well: the will of God…

But Evil, Death nor Sin was known at all;

No Grave, no Tears, no need of chastening rod

Had yet marked out the dangers of a Fall.

There stood the cursing Tree with fruit so fair

That sparkled in the bright primordial Sun;

And Eve and Adam must have wondered where

The path might lead some disobedient one…

Oh Man! Oh Woman! Could you not have seen

The Test that faced you in that fateful Tree?

Could you not build some wall, some fence, some screen

To hide the thing from sight away from Thee?

You had no axe, no saw, to cut it down,

No flame of fire to burn it to its root,

So, daily gathering food you passed it round,

Perhaps admiring its alluring fruit…

Was neither of you wise enough to guess

The beauty of that Tree might be a snare

To keep your naked feet from righteousness

Or slither near to catch you unaware?

For on that fateful day, a wily snake

Proposed to you the charming, reasoning Lie

That you from naive slumbers could awake

And gain the wisdom God would dare deny…

That Good and Evil are Yours to define

And You, God’s children, could cheat your demise

By quoting Satan: “All of His, be MINE!”

By eating fruit desired to make one WISE.

MNA

10/14/2022

In the Picture?

TRUTH is that which corresponds to reality as it is perceived by GOD.

The preceding sentence is probably the most accurate definition of truth ever devised. Notice that the definition is carefully worded so as to put the final measure of truth in God’s hands, not ours.

Saint Anselm defined God as “that Being than whom no greater can be conceived.” This was the opening of his “ontological argument” for God’s existence. The argument from BEING. Basically, the argument is that God exists NECESSARILY, both as a concept AND as a Reality. For if HE didn’t exist, neither could, or would, anything else!

It follows quite easily that since God’s existence is the only way reality can be accounted for, then His VIEW of reality is the only way TRUTH can be rightly defined.

Since our corporate “fall” in the Garden of Eden, we, Adam and Eve’s offspring, have been engaged in the vain attempt to turn truth into a subjective animal. A amorphous chimera that can be molded and nuanced to suit us and our subjective experience. Together with our primordial parents, we swallowed the lie, “You shall be as gods.” Satan followed that promise up with the qualifier: “knowing good and evil.” But what he really meant was that we could REDEFINE right and wrong according to our corporate whim.

For fallen human beings, created in God’s image, yet saddled with a sinful nature that rebels against Him, we are actually FAR from truly “knowing good and evil.” Oh, we THINK we know what they are. We might even come close sometimes. But guess what? The history of our race proves quite clearly that our “god”-like knowledge of right and wrong is way out of kilter.

Lets take COVID-19 as a present-day example.

Pretty much our entire planet is agreeing right now that this new virus is an unqualified EVIL. It is immobilizing and terrorizing whole populations. It is killing many of our loved ones. It is closing down thousands of businesses. It is separating families. It is a source of misinformation and confusion, much of it on a global scale.

But, if Anselm is right, if God must be, and truth is reality as HE sees it...

Then we must ask ourselves, “What is the truth about the coronavirus as God perceives it?”

When Indiana’s governor gave a speech about the measures our state was taking to combat and accommodate the present crisis, he closed the address by citing his hope and plea for the people of faith in our state to continue their important work of reaching out to struggling and hurting people. He saw this as a way to keep up our morale and our hope for a better tomorrow.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but on youtube, the comments following the governor’s speech included a bunch of criticisms that chastised him for mentioning “people of faith” along with the heroic health care workers and first responders who were facing the crisis with “real” help, and not that religious nonsense (or words to that effect).

It seems that we really DO prefer to define truth, even good and evil, with God out of the picture, even though He, and no other, is the source of all being, and the arbiter of all truth, and the only true KNOWER of what is good, and hence, what is evil.

There are times in the Bible narrative, when God takes definite, concrete steps to “shake things up,” and get folks’ attention. I recall one story of how the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites and hauled it off to display it triumphantly in one of their pagan temples. God shook things up by making their idol Dagon topple over and break apart, then sending a plague of tumors and an infestation of rats!

The Philistines did all they could, humanly speaking, to solve this problem in a manner that left the Hebrew God out of the picture. Their solutions failed miserably. So they finally sent the Ark back to Israel in a cart pulled by two milk cows who had just calved, while keeping the calves away from the mothers. The cows pulled the cart straight back to Israel, proving to the Philistine leaders that God really HAD caused the plague and the infestation. “Scientific” proof!

Pestilence, plague, natural disaster, fire falling from heaven, whatever tragic situation humans have faced or will face in the future, can we not stop playing the pointless game of facing the crisis with God out of the picture? The truth is that He’s in it. He could not NOT be in it. His being makes all other reality possible. And only He perceives the crisis as it TRULY is.

Read your Bible and you’ll get a clue of the many ways God has USED seemingly evil things in the past to bring about enormous GOOD. Natural evils as well as human evils, nothing is beyond God’s ability to sovereignly sanctify it. Even evil men nailing His only Son to the cross.

Health care professionals, first responders, philanthropists, good neighbors--all of these can be symbols of hope for those caught up in a terrifying viral crisis like we’re facing right now.

But, as we thank them for their efforts, let’s trace the hope we feel back to its ultimate SOURCE.

Crises like this are one of God’s ways of making us keep Him in the picture.

MNA
4/3/2020

Run, Rejoice, Rest

O run away! Escape Destruction City.
Proud Babylon has held thee far too long,
Imprisoned by her pleasures cheap and pretty,
And lulled in senseless slumber by her song.
Succumb not to her wisdom vain and witty:
Flee now to Christ and leave her hellish throng.

Rejoice in Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior
Who, sinless, died for sinners on the tree;
For never did His virtue wane or waver,
But, raised up, Jesus silenced death’s decree!
Today, on high, He guides our gospel labor,
From Satan’s kingdom setting spirits free!

O rest and worship in His holy presence
‘Til Jesus comes all nations to depose.
This age shall pass, of faith and of repentance,
And Christ return to vanquish all our foes.
He calls all men to hush and give attendance--
O heed His word! This day of Grace shall close!


MNA
3.8.16

Salt and Light

One of the most basic and challenging problems of being faced with biblical truth, is the problem of the conventional voices we hear all around us: voices that present themselves as “common sense” while, biblically, they are known as “worldly wisdom.”

Horrific episodes such as world wars, mass murders, despotic regimes, sex trafficking, crime waves and the like, leave no doubt that our world is a broken, hurting, often desperate place. Yet, contrary to what the Scriptures teach, a myth continues to prevail in the thinking of average people that unaided human effort will be able, given enough time, money, education, unification, government programs and legislation, to cure this sick world we live in.

At the beginning of Jesus Christ’s most famous sermon--the Sermon on the Mount, after listing the virtues that encapsulate the character of His followers (the Beatitudes), the Lord launches into His stirring interpretation of the law of God. Throughout His message to His disciples, Jesus continues to emphasize the inner spirit of the law, making the point that even the most pious outward behavior of the most devoted law-keeper (such as your average Pharisee) is not enough to earn entrance into God’s eternal presence and blessing.

One can readily see that this is why Christ’s sermon started with a Beatitude countdown, designed to include both outward actions such as mourning and peacemaking, and inner attitudes like poorness of spirit and purity of heart. His listeners there in the First Century, every bit as much as readers here in the Twenty-first, tend to limit their attention and energies to the urgent business of “doing the right thing,” while neglecting the inner spirit of the law. Not only is it crucial to give attention to both inner and outward aspects of God’s requirements in order to please our Maker...it is also crucial in the practical battle of curing the world’s ills!

Even the most heroic human efforts to quash the forces that cause moral darkness and decay, end up leaving the root cause of the disease unaddressed. This root cause is what theologians have called “original sin,” and the only divinely prescribed remedy is what Jesus Himself described as a new birth--a birth from above (see John chapter 3).

In Matthew 5, immediately after the Beatitudes section, we read Jesus’ famous words to His disciples: “You are the salt of the earth...You are the light of the world.” Was He simply engaging His followers with a rah-rah-style pep talk meant to energize them before He sent them out to change the world with their unaided manpower? No. He had already listed character traits that set the standard far higher than a merely human cross-bar. These qualities were clearly ones that necessitate a profound, supernatural, spiritual heart transplant!

Let’s paraphrase this for a moment: Jesus told them, “You followers of mine, you who are poor in spirit, weep over your sins, are known for your meekness, yearn to be right with God, are quick to forgive and sacrifice for others, major on keeping a clear conscience, do all you can to heal all grievances, follow after godliness even when it costs you everything...you are salt and light for the rottenness and darkness of this sin-sick world!”

Can we agree that these traits are pretty far off the radar screen for your average heroic type-A human problem-solver? What government initiative or non-profit bureaucracy even pretends to see these as job qualifications for its agents of progress? Only one organization on earth can lay claim to such a roll-call of spiritual prerequisites--the one Jesus claimed He would build on the foundation of the prophets and apostles...the one He would empower to overrun the very gates of Hell.

The shocking, earth-shaking point the Savior is making in this pronouncement is that His church, made up of born-again believers who receive and obey His truth with childlike faith, they are the ones He is counting on to reverse the tide of global corruption and bring the floodlights of divine truth to the darkened corners of Satan’s dominion.

Christian leader, worker, teacher, businessman, official, dad, mom, teenager, writer, blogger, athlete, couch potato, whatever...

Christian: You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

Christian: Go and spread your saltiness on others. Go and shine the light of God’s Good News.

Christian: Do it now. Do it today. Do it everywhere and anyway you can.

God has no other plan.