“Things getting worse isn’t always a bad thing.”
— Carla
“Rule of thumb for my life: When God seems absent, or there’s not enough God, I’m on the verge of finding more God than I could have imagined.”
“God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false” (2 Thessalonians 2:11).
This evening, I am uncomfortable with men ascribing action to God. It makes me want to throw out all of the parts of the Bible where that happens. Why would God send a deluding influence on anyone?
I don’t always mind the aches and pains and the memory glitches that attend aging. They remind me that night comes. My hope is that light shines in the darkness.
— Dale Allison, “Heaven and Experience,” Night Comes (2016)
“To put off obeying him till we find a credible theory concerning him, is to set aside the potion we know it our duty to drink” (George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3, “Justice”).
“Such people will go on and on about visions they’ve had; they get puffed up without good reason by merely human thinking, and they don’t keep hold of the Head. It’s from Him that the whole body grows with the growth God gives it, as it’s nourished and held together by its various ligaments and joints.”
— Colossians 2:18-19, my emphasis
Paul here—or whoever wrote this wonderful letter—is making a case they the Colossian church shouldn’t listen to people trying to put rules onto them because of visions they’ve had. But I extract a principle here that corrects: Visions are not what will sustain your faith. Connecting to Jesus is what will sustain your faith.
Carla and I watched Transcendence (2014) last night as per Instructions. It probably couldn’t have been more perfect taken as a message from God: People think Him less than human and misconstrue intentions. But, as Paul Bettany’s character Max says at the end of the film, ”He created this garden for the same reason he did everything. So they could be together”—the “they” being us. His intentions are purely loving and beneficent, even if His methods are foreign to us.
And that’s just the core of what you can take from it. It can get much richer than that.
I saw an IMDb post entitled, “Humanity Lucks Out With A Benevolant AI God, And They End Him?!?” Isn’t that just what we’re doing with God?
Dude: “No I don’t go to church. I’m not wasting my time & money on some fantasy.”
Pastor: “OK. I like your Star Wars shirt.”
— “Unappreciated Pastor”
“I do not want to merely be called a Christian, but to actually be one.”
—St. Ignatius, as quoted by Stephen Crosby
“Where God closes His holy mouth, I will desist from inquiry.”
— John Calvin
Now there’s a thought.
For this reason we don’t lose heart. Even if our outer humanity is decaying, our inner humanity is being renewed day by day. This slight momentary trouble of ours is working to produce a weight of glory, passing and surpassing everything, lasting forever; for we don’t look at the things that can be seen, but at the things that can’t be seen. After all, the things you can see are here today and gone tomorrow; but the things you can’t see are everlasting (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, KNT).
We look at the things that can’t be seen. That’s a religious paradox strict empiricist might choke on. But besides being poetic, it’s true, and whether the objects of our gaze are real or not, our hope in them has real sustaining power.
It’s also leads to a thought we as believers ought to remember: We are, in the end, talking about Someone invisible. Why balk at the idea that some folks don’t believe?
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: The Mind of the Universe (1981), as quoted in Eric Metaxas’ Miracles (2014)
“’Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?’ Genesis 18:25 is the last resting place of perplexed and godly minds.”
“There should be a sign on every website in the world over the comments section that reads, ‘Here there be dragons.’”
“Faith & doubt are not enemies. Faith & doubt are dance partners.”
“The Christian apologetic isn’t in argumentation/debate; it’s in love.”
— Danny Cortez, as quoted by Rachel Held Evans
I got goosebumps this evening when I read…
“…Sing for joy in the Lord, O you righteous ones; Praise is becoming to the upright. Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre; Sing praises to Him with a harp of ten strings. Sing to Him a new song; Play skillfully with a shout of joy. For the word of the Lord is upright, And all His work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; The earth is full of the lovingkindness of the Lord.
[…]
“Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, On those who hope for His lovingkindness, To deliver their soul from death And to keep them alive in famine. Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield. For our heart rejoices in Him, Because we trust in His holy name. Let Your lovingkindness, O Lord, be upon us, According as we have hoped in You” (Psalm 33:1-5,18-22).
And I think I got goosebumps because I’m supposed to have this same attitude in me. And I’m supposed to sing to Him.
“Rooted in hatred of the light, our blindness is not exculpatory, but blameworthy. It does not remove our guilt. It is our guilt.”
— John Piper, in a tweet that sits very well with me. I am such a chimera: I love so much of what Piper brings to the table, but hate so much of it, too. I think he’s right about human blindness, but I think he is wrong about it, too. Does the above formulation strike me as true and good merely because it’s what I’m used to, merely because it feels like home? Am I, are we, indeed guilty for not being able to see Him?
“When you are convinced it’s broken, read the manual. Your interpretation of ‘obvious’ my differ from its designer.”
— Mike McHargue, in a tweet he left ambiguous as whether he was talking about actual technical documentation, the Bible, or something else. I do think there is something helpful in his formulation in settling the problem of evil.
“Faith in the ‘crucified God' is …a contradiction of everything [people] have ever…desired to be assured of by the term.”
—Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God
“I measured distances by the standard of man, man waling on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed ‘infinite riches’ in what would have been to motorists ‘a little room.’ The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space.’ It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy [1955]).
I’m with you, Jack.
“To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then ‘written up’ out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; an he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy [1955]).
He may have missed the potential parallels skeptics would surmise between the news and the Gospel accounts, but nevertheless, it is good to find a kindred spirit in my eschewing of the news.
“Heart versus head (spirit versus mind) is a cliché, and false dichotomy.”
“It is your responsibility to stop listening to voices that hinder your ongoing growth and maturity.”
— Rob Bell
“A wise enemy will attack you on two fronts: exploit your weaknesses, and undermine confidence in your strength. Don’t be surprised when there is much ‘push back’ against you from all quarters (natural and spiritual) when you set your mind to be authentically who you are in Christ and bless the world by expressing it. Our adversary and Christian religion will tolerate you listening to sermons and singing worship songs, etc. Set your sail to be authentically you in Christ, and war is on.”