Jacob's Limp

Confession

2012-01-28T02:49:00.000-08:00

Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843)

Daily I try to follow the Bible readings of Robert Murray M'Cheyne. M'Cheyne, who entered Heaven before his 30th birthday, is reputed to have been Scotland's greatest preacher. Today I am at Matthew 28-The Resurrection and The Great Commission. Matthew 28:19 is called The Great Commission. The Saviour enjoins those who are His to go and tell. The next (and last) verse of the First Gospel is a kind of Great Comfort. We are promised that when we go He will accompany. The first recorded words of Jesus (Luke 2:49) are an explanation of why He was not with His parents. Jesus' last words in the Gospels are a promise that He will be with His disciples. More specifically the promise is made to disciples who carry out His orders.
And joyful orders they are.
Three days ago a friend told me "My enthusiasm about living the Christian life is exactly proportional to my willingness to share my faith." CT Studd, who enjoyed celebrity at Cambridge in the 1890's, died in the Belgian Congo in 1931. He confessed that when he stopped sharing his faith as a way of life his love for Jesus grew cold.
My assignment in the Church where I worship affords me the title 'Pastor'.
Because the church I serve is in Hungary I am sometimes called a 'Missionary'.
Because I am called both Pastor and Missionary it is a reasonable assumption that my life is adorned by much prayer and constant witness.
That assumption is false.

Elizabeth II Rocks

2011-12-31T05:30:00.000-08:00

26 December

After reading what I thought was an unedited version of the Queen’s annual Christmas address to the nation yesterday I wrote to some friends that the Queen, though never actually mentioning the name "Jesus", actually called Him a Saviour sent into the world by God. Naturally I was delighted by that.

Today when I listened to a BBC Replay of the entire address I was much more encouraged. What I originally wrote was inaccurate, because the version I read had excised the Queen's strongest Christian remarks. No great surprise there.

That gracious lady did indeed refer to JESUS.

“Jesus was born into a world full of fear. The angels came to frightened shepherds… ‘Fear not,’ they urged, ‘we bring you tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.’

Although we are capable of great acts of kindness history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves—from our recklessness or our greed.”

The Queen was not crafting a theological treatise. If she were, we would have hoped she would have gone farther. We would have hoped she would say, “All of history, all our experience, our conscience and Holy Scripture make it overwhelmingly obvious that we do indeed need saving from ourselves ALL THE TIME. We need saving not only from our recklessness and greed but also from our unbelief.”

But I’m grateful for her boldness in going as far as she did. Her words were wisely chosen especially when we consider who her audience is. This Queen has been a consistently underrated superstar. Throughout the address she emphasized our desperate need of forgiveness and love. She is the titular head of the Church of England. She is the reigning monarch over a Kingdom where there are more Muslims at the Mosque on Friday than there are Anglicans at Church on Sunday. It would be too much to hope that the themes of love and forgiveness have been prominent in those Friday meetings in recent years.

The Queen went on:

“God sent into the world a unique Person—not a philosopher nor a general (important as they are), but a Saviour with the power to forgive. Forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian faith. It can heal broken families. It can restore friendships. And it can reconcile divided communities. It is in forgiveness that we learn the power of God’s love.

In the last verse of this beautiful carol ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ there is a prayer:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem
Descend to us we pray
Cast out our sin
And enter in
Be born in us today

It is my prayer that on this Christmas Day we might all find room in our lives for the message of the angels and for the love of God through Christ our Lord.”

Preach it Sister.

God save the Queen, say I.

But I’m pretty sure He already has.

The Death of Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T05:11:00.000-08:00

(1949-2011)

The Death of Christopher Hitchens

Last night Christopher Hitchens discovered he had an immortal soul after all. As far as his present state of consciousness goes I'll leave it at that. His mortal frame expired at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. He was 62.
He was a prolific journalist and literary critic, but he was most famous as a leading exponent of The New Atheism. Along with Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins he was included in the group known as The Four Horsemen, an elite coterie of particularly vocal and virulent atheists whom he confessed himself honored to be among. The New Atheists are distinguished from the old atheists mainly by an insistence that there is no reason to be respectful of religion in general or Christianity in particular. On the contrary, duty demanded that a thing as evil as belief in God be combated tirelessly. AJ Ayer, a pioneering hero of the new school, declared that Christianity was not only a bad religion, it was the worst religion. No person of faith was off limits and no cow so sacred as to be spared. He famously referred to Mother Teresa as The Ghoul of Calcutta and called her a "lying, thieving Albanian dwarf."
Positively I can say this about him. He was an adroit debater- far cleverer than Richard Dawkins. Dawkins knows nothing of history or philosophy-precious little about anything outside his specialty.
Hitchens came off like a polymath.
He wasn't.
He scraped by at Balliol College Oxford with a Third. He mocked CS Lewis' famous trilemma as "pathetic". (The 'Trilemma' was actually originated by an earlier Oxford scholar-Alfred Edersheim, a Viennese Jew converted in Budapest in the 1840's. The idea is as follows: When we look at the breathtaking scope of Jesus' claims we are not left with the option that He could have been a great teacher merely. Great teachers don't claim the authority to forgive sins. In fact Jesus assumed prerogatives of Deity. Jesus, according to Edersheim, Lewis and a host of others, leaves us with but three options. Either He knew He wasn't God, though He claimed to be, which would make Him a liar. Or He thought He was God but wasn't, which would make Him a lunatic. Or...His claims were true. Hence the Trilemma: Lord, lunatic or liar.)
It is particularly laughable that Hitchens would mock CS Lewis as a shabby thinker as Lewis was awarded three Firsts in one undergraduate career at Oxford, countering Hitchens' lowest with his highest.
But Christopher Hitchens' projection of a broad, urbane intellectualism was dazzling. There's little doubt that after University he began to do his homework. And he was indefatigable. Possessed of a roguish charm he could be self-deprecating, and it was seductive.
But...
Charm is deceitful.
The coherence of his arguments was apparent not real. Like all atheist debaters he lingered not long over:
1) The inexplicable existence of matter and energy
2) The bridge from the material to the sentient
and
3) The powerful valence of morality as an intellectual and emotional force.
He steered clear because atheism (recent attempts of Stephen Hawking notwithstanding) cannot plausibly account for these realities. He preferred to rant along the lines of the hypocrisy of professing believers (a primary emphasis of the Gospels), the scandal that God would allow suffering (one theme of the Book of Job) and the alleged unfairness of hell -a charge his own stated preferences undermined.
He was an inveterate blasphemer.
Ironically, (and this would not have pleased him), he confirmed two of CSL's theories about unbelief. If God does not exist why the emotive focus? Lewis remembered that while he was an atheist he was absolutely sure that God was not there. He was also very angry with this God who-is-not-there kind of God. Christopher Hitchens hated the Christian God for the stupefying reason that he felt morally superior to Him. When you listen to his arguments Richard Dawkins is actually begging us not to believe in God simply because he himself cannot conceptualize such a being. It never seems to have occurred to Dawkins that God may not be a carbon based life form after all. The thrusts of Hitchens' own atheism moved along different lines. Hitchens’ consistent plea was that if God exists He is morally contemptible.
At least he served the noble purpose of proving that hypocrisy is not the exclusive domain of religion. Hitchens deserted his wife and two year old while his wife was pregnant. He deserted them for a woman he moved in with the day he met her. He blamed the God who wasn't there for all suffering (presumably also the suffering of his wife and children) but worshiped Leo Trotsky, a blood-curdling mass murderer. That’s not all, but the man is dead and there's no need to pile on.
Hitchens also confirmed Lewis' contention that it is a mistake to assume all unbelievers prefer heaven to hell. Hitchens said that heaven would be like living in North Korea. As he believed the Christian God to be at least as vile as Kim Jong-il he viewed the Christian heaven as a place so loathsome he wouldn't want to be caught dead there.
Therefore he met at least one of his goals by dying.
I had prayed for him as recently as two days ago.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

Spurgeon

2011-06-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

June 19, 1834 – January 31, 1892

Today is the birthday of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the greatest preacher ever to preach in the English language. I'd be happy for disagreements, because other candidates could inspire a nomination for second place. Whitefield? Martyn Lloyd-Jones? John Stott? I really have no idea who should be second.
But I suspect it's a distance second.
Spurgeon was the son and grandson of ministers but was not converted without difficulty. The precipitating event was a snow-storm while the 15 year-old was trying to walk to a ferry on a Sunday morning early in the year 1850. Realizing the inadvisability of pressing against the weather he took shelter in a Primitive Methodist Chapel at Colchester. Conditions were such that the preacher never arrived at the service, so the sexton preached extemporaneously from Isaiah 45:22: "Look to Me. all ye ends of the earth and be saved."
Spurgeon did and he was.
The sexton's name is lost to history.
Within five years hardly a building in England could house the crowds who wanted to hear the boy preacher.
He began as pastor of a small chapel in Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire. He left there for New Park Street Chapel, London. Soon the facilities were inadequate to contain the throngs, and so, in time, the great Metropolitan Tabernacle was built.
What was the secret of his greatness?
God, God and God.
Apart from that obvious answer four things stand out.
!) Spurgeon had an unshakeable conviction that the Bible is the Word of God. He ministered in an era when confidence in biblical authority was in dramatic decline. The emergence of evolution meant that human life was being accounted for naturalistically. Liberal criticism contended that Holy Scripture could be accounted for humanly. The day of confidence in the divine source of anything seemed to be passing. Spurgeon never blinked. His sermons were powerful because they reposed on the infallible authority of a speaking God.
2) Spurgeon was a lover of the Lord Jesus Christ. He adored the immaculate Person of the bleeding Savior. He worshipped as he preached and showed the worship of Jesus to be a beautiful and necessary thing from which no sane creature should shrink.
3) He believed in the absolute sovereignty of God when it came to saving sinners. Possessed with gifts of evangelistic persuasion unparalleled in the world he nevertheless insisted, "I could as easily create a planet as I could save a soul. Salvation is God’s work."
4) He embraced the sphere of human instrumentality with ardor. He believed that the sovereign God sovereignly determined to use the pleading of fallen creatures to bring their fellows to repentance. And so he pled. Solemnly but winsomely, logically yet not without emotion, and lovingly yet without compromise he pled.
Under God's good hand he preached up a harvest
And under God's hand he reaped abundantly.
Of course his sermons were not solely evangelistic. His sermons fed the church, grew disciples and raised up missionaries.
Nor was he solely a pulpit warrior. He founded an Orphanage and a Pastor's College. He supported the widows of pastors. He provided cheap books for ministers and he sent out home and foreign workers.
He took no salary but lived off the sale of his sermons and books.
We now languish in a second century since Spurgeon.
May God grant another.

Sometimes Mid Scenes of Deepest Gloom...

2011-06-17T05:17:00.000-07:00

A voice was heard in Ramah,
Weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
And she refused to be comforted
Because they were no more

Weeks ago I wrote something about the death of Osama bin-Laden but I didn't post it.
I've made a few visits to countries where his ideology holds sway. I'd like to do a bit more in such places before I'm done.
Therefore my ambition inhibits my candor.
But this week there was another death which I simply must write about.
Years ago I was reading one of Ruth Bell Graham's Memoirs.
She was remembering her father's missionary colleagues in China, and in one section she enumerated their monumental suffering.
There's a strange notion about that if we try to make righteous choices and consecrate our lives to high purposes we will somehow escape any disturbance to the comfort of our lives.
Any survey of the brief Life and painful Death of Jesus of Nazareth ought to be sufficient to disabuse us of that illusion.
But the myth persists. I suppose it is a species of the equally mythological belief that we can merit or earn our own salvation.
For years I've known a young Dutch couple who are sterling Missionaries. He left a brilliant career in Physics, they moved to Budapest, bore down, and learned the language in record time. He wrote a book in Hungarian while still in his 20's. They'd been told they could not have children. A few months ago she conceived, but early on the doctors warned them with dark forebodings. This week they were presented with their little Rebekah. And a few hours later the child entered heaven.
Yesterday I had a brief visit with them in the hospital.
I suppose it's something God knew He could trust them with-this assignment no Christian would want. This assignment so like the assignment God the Father took upon Himself.
God will not prove His love for us by keeping those we love from suffering and death.
He offers that proof in a different way.
He proves His love by refusing to protect the One He loves from suffering and death.
They know that and they brought it up.
Like Jesus they have suffered.
Like Jesus they will die.
Like Jesus they will rise.
And they will prevail.

And when my task on earth is done
When by Thy grace the victory won
E'en death's cold wave I will not flee
Since God through Jordan leadeth me

The Last Gift

2011-04-22T03:39:00.000-07:00

A jar full of sour wine was standing there; so they put a sponge full of the sour wine upon a branch of hyssop and brought it to His mouth. And when Jesus therefore had received the sour wine, He said, "It is finished." And he bowed His head and gave up His Spirit."
John 19:29-30

It was at the Wedding Feast in Cana of Galilee where the Lord Jesus offered His first gift to the Church. The guests at the reception were the first physical beneficiaries of that miraculous wine. But surely you and I and all believers are beneficiaries as well. The wine was judged to be exceptionally good, a wine which everyone was pleased to drink.
Today, Good Friday, we naturally think of the Feast which was not festive. It was Passover Week during the long ago Spring when the Jewish Messiah was slain upon the Roman Cross. The irony is as obvious as it is cruel. Passover marked the occasion when God spared the sons of Israel in Egypt. That Spring they celebrated by taking the Life of the Son of God in Jerusalem.
Both Feasts culminated in a gift of wine.
The wine offered to Christ was of a far different quality than the wine offered by Christ.
Apart from death itself it was our last gift to Him.
Only He could give the wine no one was able to make.
Only He would drink the wine no one was willing to take.
Christians take pains to combat sin. It is well that we should. We may begin a fast, study a book, or join a group. Anything that helps me not to sin is a good thing. And I need lots of help.
I find that Good Friday helps.
And I am helped specifically by that gift of sour wine.
When I am tempted: the lustful gaze, the unkind word, the selfish choice...in those rare victorious moments I check myself and ask,"Is this the gift I offer Him, Who gave such gifts to me? Do I offer Him the dregs, the vinegar of my life, this sour choice for Him who yielded such perfection so willingly for me?"
May your worship during these days be profitable, fruitful and fitting for Him whose achievement overwhelmed the Cross, the grave the skies.

For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary and lose heart. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin.
Hebrews 12:3-4

April 12th and the Soviet Achievement

2011-04-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Gagarin at the Half-Century Auspicious events tend to cluster around April 12th. When Paul Simon sang "Kathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, Michigan seems like a dream to me now," he was singing about a girl he met on April 12, 1964. That night he played his first Folk Club in England. Okay, I admit almost nobody knows or cares about that, but the Civil War started on this day in 1861, and Franklin Roosevelt died in Georgia this day in 1945. And fifty years ago today the Soviets launched the first man into space. At that moment the news seemed almost as threatening to the future of America as the start of the Civil War. We were being drubbed in the space race. It meant we kids had to take lots more math and science courses than we would have had there been no Sputnik or Soviet first in manned space flight. That alone probably shut me out of Harvard. Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut on board, became for awhile the most famous man in the world. When we lived in Moscow we passed Yuri Gagarin Square when we traveled to the center. The space pioneer was commemorated by an obelisk which resembled a kind of poor man's Washington Monument. The Soviets were not content with their very real technological victory over the West. They insisted on piling on. They claimed an ideological victory as well. That 'victory' was patently bogus. Amazingly, they chose the theological rather than the political side of ideology. At the press conference Gagarin declared (in words no doubt scripted by someone else) that when he looked out of his space capsule he didn't see God anywhere. As if God were someone like the Great Oz who lived in danger of a little dog pulling the curtain back. As if a Russian could somehow stumble onto His hideout. WA Criswell, my future pastor at First Baptist Dallas observed that if he'd taken his helmet off for a moment then he would have seen God. And my future and current hero CS Lewis wrote in the Saturday Evening Post "I wouldn't want to worship a god who could be sneaked up on by a Soviet Cosmonaut." In 1968 Yuri Gagarin perished when he crashed his MIG jet. On that day he saw God too late. Have a good April 12th. Make it auspicious if you can.

A Good Question

2011-03-26T00:08:00.001-07:00

"... the most intractable of all human questions: what are we on earth for? Is history merely a series of events whose sum is meaningless? Is there no fundamental moral difference between the history of the human race and the history, say, of ants?
Or is there a providential plan of which we are, however humbly, the agents?"
Paul Johnson
A History of the Jews (1987)

I Guess it Depends on the Standard

2011-03-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

Dave McIntyre 1951-2011

Elizabeth Taylor 1931-2011

Today I leave the little village on the Rhine where I've been staying for four days.
When I arrived the nine year old who lives here asked me two questions straight away. Did I know who Abbott and Costello were, and was I familiar with Gilligan's Island?
Strong affirmation on both counts.
"Wow," he gasped, "Ronnie knows everything."
It raised a good laugh at least.
I felt strangely drawn to his conclusion, but I fear it was based on insufficient data.
I guess it depends on the standard.
It took me 48 hours to learn of the death of my seminary friend Dave McIntyre.
Dave was a rarity among our classmates in that he served only one church for 34 years.
In the same hour I learned that Elizabeth Taylor had died, but that news reached me in about 48 minutes
The contrast between the two as far as relational perseverance goes is too obvious to elaborate.
More than once in the pulpit I've confessed that I'm able to name all Elizabeth Taylor's husbands in order. I confess it as an indefensible use of brain band width. Indefensible especially as I cannot name the Kings of Judah.
We absorb so many cultural artifacts unwittingly and even unwillingly. Few of us will have memorized the Beatitudes. But if I say,
"There she goes just a walkin' down the street."
most of a certain age will reply--
"Singing Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo."
What do those words mean?
They don't mean anything, but nearly everyone in my generation memorized them.
To forgive a beautiful woman is the easiest thing in the world.
Homer knew that and he was blind.
In "The Illiad" King Menelaus meant to slay his faithless wife when he retrieved her from Troy. But when the moment came Helen's beauty overwhelmed him, and he took her back as his wife.
Debbie Reynolds, whose first husband left to become Elizabeth's fourth, later voted for her rival to receive an Academy Award. She even co-starred with her in a film.
I remember once hearing Richard Burton defend his wife on the grounds that, though she had married many times, there were only those particular men in her life. It was a dubious line of reasoning, but I suppose there were but few lines of defense open to him. She certainly made it hard for him to be loyal to his own wife and the same can be said for Michael Wilding and Eddie Fisher.
I suppose good manners require that we say nice things when a goddess dies.
Her son Michael Wilding was ready with an admirable tribute to his mother.
He said that the world had been a better place for her presence.
I guess it depends on the standard.

Prayers or Lies?

2011-03-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I heard an evangelical scholar (he held a Cambridge PhD) declare that nearly all Christians are liars. He supported this provocative thesis by citing how quickly Christians assure others of prayer support without following through. He made no distinction between breaking a promise and telling a lie.
In Memphis last month I visited a saint in her 10th decade. She was hindered by infirmity but buoyant with praise. After I asked after her health she began to give God the credit for her physical survival and relative well being. The human credit she ascribed to my prayers.
Had I ever told her I would pray?
Quite likely.
Had I prayed for her?
I fear me not.
Is it dishonest to sustain a false impression by silence?
Can anyone be sure the answer is "no"?
I felt convicted but I said not a word.
Maybe we should leave off promising to pray unless we record the commitment and enroll an accountability partner immediately.
Maybe we should deflect the request by responding, "Will you pray for my prayer life?"
One thing needful is to pray WITH them immediately before leaving the impression that we will ever pray FOR them
I prayed for her just now.
I want to do better.
I could scarcely do worse.

Something to Share near Christmas

2010-12-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

John Stott (April 27, 1921-)

I just listened to a 2002 Christmas sermon preached in London by John R.W. Stott. We're two weeks out and counting and I'd be pleased to hear a message like that every day until the 25th. John Stott may be our best living preacher in English. He's definitely in the top five. He'll be 90 next year, and he won't be a part of our world much longer. I believe his insights are too good to hoard.
The text was Matthew Two--The Visit of the Magi. I found the outline headings especially striking and wish them to be widely known. So I will share those headings followed by one or two personal observations. Anything lucid or helpful has to be from Stott. If it's muddled or off the mark assume it's mine.

I. No trouble is too great to seek Him.
It's snowed all day in Budapest. To render a small service to my King I faced the weather this morning and returned in a self-congratulatory mood. Then I listened to the story of the Magi. What was my inconvenience compared to their own? They embraced the weariness of distance, danger from the elements, danger from animals, danger from brigands. They didn't know their destination having only a general orientation .They didn't know His Name. They only knew they must find Him. And, appropriating God's help, find Him they did.

II. No people are too alien to find Him.
They were searching for the King of the Jews. They were certainly not Jews themselves. How common would it have been to search for a foreign king for the purpose of worship? The Jews were a conquered people. Why pay fealty to their King?
Under this heading the preacher made an assertion sure of disputation. I don't intend to defend the assertion; I only want to publicize it. As the observation is so politically incorrect it is necessary to emphasize that JRW Stott is not a right-winger from the Bible Belt. He took a Double First at Cambridge. His politics are decidedly left of center. He is a Socialist and a Unilateralist. He is a Pacifist who refused military service in WWII thus alienating himself from his own soldier father for years.
And yet in his message JRWS declared that Christianity is the only major non-ethnic religion .I don't expect much contention on that score from Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Shintoism, or Confucianism. From Islam I can well imagine something more aggressive than a slight demur. But Islam took root among the Arab people and those they conquered. The fulcrum of Islam's power was found at the point of a sword not in historical legitimacy or moral suasion. Whatever the personal faith of its adherents Islam was a useful apologetic in the service of Arab expansionism. Timothy Keller is fond of saying that Jesus' message was "Crown me or Kill Me." The Muslim message was "Convert or Die."So the potential for its message to convert beyond the Arab peninsula without the use of force must remain a hypothesis contested.
The Magi were likely practitioners of astrology or occultic arts. The very name suggests a kinship to 'magic.' But they came to worship Jesus. If they could be reached no one is beyond the pale.

III. No gift is too precious to give Him.
We are impressed by the variety of the gifts, the value of the gifts and the significance of the gifts. By significance I mean merely this. The requirements for the altar in Exodus 30 included elements of gold , frankincense and myrrh. The altar-- the place where the sacrifice was laid and atonement was made. Did they know or was the significance unwitting? We can't be sure but it doesn't matter. It is enough that God knew and that He orchestrated the thing. It is enough that we know and adore.
Though we can't be certain precisely what they knew it has been conjectured that they accessed Daniel's writings and ascertained the general time period.
It is hard to read:
"Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and are come to worship Him." Matthew 2:2
--without imagining that they had somehow read:
"For unto us a Child is born, unto us, a Son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and his Name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." Isaiah 9:6
They were looking for a King, perhaps because they knew the government would be upon His shoulder. They were intent upon worship, perhaps because they knew it was right to call Him 'The Mighty God.'
They didn't know everything but they knew enough to begin a quest highly rewarded.
Having read their story we share their reward.
Would that we would imitate their worship.
Before we even begin we know more with less effort than they knew after they arrived.
What obligations are placed upon us by that knowledge.
And what privilege.

John Stott - The King Who is Shepherd

2010-12-11T09:33:00.000-08:00

The Murders at Church

2010-11-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

Martin Luther
(Nov. 10, 1483-Feb. 18, 1546)

Ignatius Loyola
(1491-July 31, 1556)

I've only been to Baghdad once. I do sometimes frequent the safer havens in Northern Iraq where Kurds control and (most of the time) Americans are welcome. In that one brief Baghdad visit (to secure a visa before heading North) the small plane from Amman landed in a sudden corkscrew motion. I naively asked the flight attendant (young, male, South African and Christian) if the odd angle was for fuel economy.
"No, he answered.”It's to make us a harder target for RPG's."
RPG's are Rocket Propelled Grenades.
I decided at that point to give Baghdad a miss in future visits.
So far I’ve managed never to return.
So much for Missionary heroism.
Yesterday was an unusual Reformation Day for me. First, in our own Service of Worship, there was a dramatic portrayal of Martin Luther nailing up the Ninety-Five Theses. After the service Jane and I watched the first half of the Ralph Fiennes movie on Martin Luther. We'd already seen the film but enjoyed the second go-round. We left early because we had an evening commitment in a Hungarian Protestant Church- a Reformation-Day Concert (Bach and Vivaldi).The homily was delivered by a Jesuit Priest. I was amazed by the limitless boundaries of ecumenism. Afterwards I asked the preacher if he thought Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuits and spearpoint of the Counter-Reformation) would have spoken in a Protestant Church on Reformation Day. He said he didn't know but I think he did know. I think Loyola would have gladly spoken in any Protestant Church but only after he had arrested the worshipers.
I am not eager to go out of my way to pick fights with Catholics. Neither am I willing to minimize the fierce differences which remain. It does no good to insist that we preach the same Gospel.
We don't.
That said there comes a time to salute and even praise those with whom we disagree.
Such a time has come.
Last night about the time we were attending the Reformation Day service in Budapest terrorists took over a Roman Catholic service in Baghdad. The death toll now stands at 52. It may rise. Many who claim Christian affiliation have emigrated from Iraq. Most Christians have fled Baghdad. There remains though an intrepid remnant who not only stay but worship. That number was cruelly diminished last evening not by flight but by slaughter.
Of those Roman Catholic worshipers in Baghdad I can only declare that I mourn their blood.
I praise their courage.
And I want to follow their example.
God help the grieving family members and the wounded.
God help us all.

FF Bruce at 100

2010-10-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

Frederic Fyvie Bruce, the greatest biblical scholar of his generation, was born one hundred years ago today in Elgin, Scotland. I well remember my sense of loss at his death in the autumn of 1990 within about 30 days of Philip Edgcumbe Hughes' death, another noteworthy evangelical commentator. I was stung then by the diminution of evangelical firepower. I reflect now upon the great gift FF Bruce was to the church. I well remember the first flurry of impressions of Professor Bruce I had as a new Christian. In his apologetics Josh McDowell leaned heavily on FF B's 'The New Testament Documents: Are they Reliable?' I remain in awe of the breadth of Prof. Bruce's scholarship.

His major strength was New Testament Greek and the field of Textual Criticism. But he also took a Gold Medal in Hebrew at Cambridge. His undergraduate Classical Studies were at Aberdeen. He gained a mastery of German at the University of Vienna. He visited Hungary in the Thirties and wrote about it in his Autobiography. Like CS Lewis he never took an academic doctorate though he navigated many a young scholar through doctoral studies. His English prose style was not remarkable but I was taken at the name of one of his volumes of Church History. He called it 'The Spreading Flame.'

Later he wrote an Introduction to a book by Dewey Beegle which featured an unfortunate view of biblical authority. I am not competent to speculate on his reasons or what that Introduction signaled about his own views. But I can't imagine he would have agreed with every jot and tittle of the dozens of books he wrote introductions for.

In the early 80's I was desperate for help on an illustration from ancient history. It was Sunday morning and the service was about to begin. In those dark pre-internet days when we actually had to look things up in books I realized that I'd not budgeted enough time to find what I was looking for. I couldn’t share the illustration with insufficient data. So I tried to shelve the idea. But I couldn't get the thing out of my mind. I remembered that somebody or other somewhere or other for some reason or other drew a line around somebody in the sand. I wanted to use the story as an evangelistic exhortation.

Running out of time at about ten to eleven I picked up the phone and dialed Manchester, England Directory Assistance. Amazingly I was given his number. Even more amazingly he answered the phone. After profuse apologies for intruding upon his Sunday afternoon I supplied the embarrassingly vague outline.
"Do you know the story?"I asked.
"Oh yes, oh yes," he replied.
"Can you help me then?"
"Oh yes ,oh yes."
He commenced,"168 BC Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria took advantage of the Roman preoccupation with the Punic Wars and invaded Egypt. The Roman Senate dispatched a delegate named Lysias to Egypt to order Aniochus out. They met on the beach. Lysias declared 'By order of the Roman Senate and People I command you to leave Egypt.'
Antiochus said, 'I’ll think about it.'
'Fine,' said Lysias. 'Think about it all you want.'
Then, drawing a circle around him in the sand on the beach, he added, 'Just make your decision before you step outside that circle.'
Antiochus left Egypt.
And the authority for this," said FF Bruce, "is the Greek historian Polybius."
"Well Professor Bruce," I responded, "this just proves an American rumor."
"And what rumor is that?" he asked.
"The rumor that you know everything."
He didn't know everything.
But he came close.
On his hundredth I thank God for the consecrated and generous scholarship which his life brought to biblical studies.
For over twenty years I haven't known who to call.
Perhaps we were given the Internet as a compensation.
But that's hardly an even trade..

Little Things That Happen

2010-09-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

(October 15, 1881 – October 26, 1944)

William Temple, one time Archbishop of Canterbury, records a wry observation about prayer. He said that when he prayed strange coincidents occurred. And when he failed to pray they did not.
Inspiration-wise this is hardly radical stuff. Not quite the thing to launch the troops up over the ramparts. He may just as well have said, "Two cheers for prayer."
It falls short of the bold vehemence of a promise like:
"Ask anything in My Name and I will do it."
I can honestly think of only one reason to commend the quote:
It happens to be true.
Before I left for a trip to the Czech Republic on August 26th, Jane and I prayed. For some reason we began praying for friends infected with Lyme's Disease, though we'd received no recent requests. Jane's younger brother has suffered for years and three friends in Memphis have endured long out-of-state hospital stays trying to shake free of it. We talked about Lyme's after we prayed and it struck me as odd that the emphasis should emerge out of nowhere on that particular morning.
Entering Budapest Keleti Station (the place where Hercule Poirot was standing at the beginning of 'Murder on the Orient Express') I heard the delightful news that the train was three hours late. I settled in for the grim wait and struck up a conversation with a 35 year old Czech going home to Prague. He told me he owned a tea company and asked what I do. I usually try to draw that one out and stimulate a little curiosity, but this time I gave in quickly and admitted, "I'm a Bible teacher." He brightened noticeably.
Not the response I'm used to.
"I've just come from my doctor and he was telling me about Christianity," said he.
I asked why, if he lived in Prague, he came all the way to Budapest to the doctor (nearly seven hours by rail).
"The best specialist for my illness lives in Budapest."
"What is your illness?" I asked.
"I have Lyme's Disease."
You know I should have seen it coming, but I didn't.
The inevitable dialog began.
I'm confident it will continue, in person, soon, and in Prague.
It won't be easy. His commitment to Buddhism is such that he has learned the Tibetan language.
Pretty impressive.
God's commitment to the salvation of Czechs and Buddhists is such that he sent His only begotten Son.
Even more impressive.
I carry the conviction that the whole thing didn't begin at Keleti station.
I rather think it began in prayer.

Sport and the Argument from Transcendence

2010-06-27T01:21:00.000-07:00

Over ten years ago I engaged a young atheist in a debate over the existence of God. He was a Harvard graduate and much brighter than I ( I encounter that cruel phenomenon far too often ). He'd been influenced by the not yet famous Richard Dawkins, whose book, The Blind Watchmaker, was much to his liking. Nothing I said could budge him with this one exception.
He flinched on the subject of transcendence.
He'd fallen in love with a Christian girl. Indeed that was the whole reason for our conversation. He admitted transcendence was real because he felt it. He believed his love for the girl to be transcendent. And he was candid enough to confess that he couldn't account for transcendence in his philosophy.
Some time later he did come to faith in the Savior. I wish I could claim credit. But, as human credit goes, the Lord used someone else to bring him round.
Now transcendence is an easier thing to feel than to explain. The Oxford English Dictionary (one of my favorite material possessions) ties the term to a realm beyond the physical. Transcendence suggests something quite over and outside ourselves, indeed something which can't quite be accounted for by considerations limited to ourselves, though the secularists make the attempt with all their might.
Love of course is transcendent. As is music. As is patriotism. As is Sport.
We (Jane, Seth and I) were in Italy last week. Better last week than now. To surrender the World Cup via an early exit at the hands of little Slovakia is an agony which will linger long in Italy. At one time there were something like 12 DAILY newspapers devoted to football in that country. It’s something that matters to the Italians.
We arrive at the question of WHY it matters. Why does kicking a ball into a net matter? Why do we get a lump in our throats when someone from our country ascends the medal stand and our National Anthem is played? How and for what reason does sport take us out of ourselves? Why is sport transcendent? Indeed why is anything transcendent?
I have a theory. It's a theory born of Christian conviction.
My theory is that a thing is transcendent if it shadows a corresponding reality in heaven.
The most transcendent thing is the family. The relationship we are born into or we marry into is the thing we are most willing to die for. The original and ultimate reality is the Father and the Son in heaven.
A nation is an extension of the family. Patriotism and Sport itself at the Olympic and World Cup level are expressions of the nation. It's OUR country we cheer for is it not?
Sport is also a metaphor for war. We struggle and fight. One side wins. The other side is vanquished. War, amazingly and mysteriously, is something which also takes place in heaven (Revelation 12:7).
I suppose only war itself could have distracted the world's attention from soccer this week. Even Wimbledon couldn't muster much of a distraction until the 11 hour match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. After the match was over Isner called Mahut a 'warrior.'
Sport can also be a substitute. We live vicariously in the defeat and victory of our team. But there's also something there which is less obvious. George Orwell wrote that where religious faith is absent totalitarianism is inevitable. Men cannot live without absolutes. If we reject the Heavenly Kingdom we will demand subservience to an earthly kingdom.
We simply will care about something. If it's not something which matters, it will be something which appears to matter at the moment.
Like kicking a ball into a net.
I'm not suggesting that caring about sport must necessarily displace the Larger Things.
No doubt the Apostle Paul was an enthusiast for Sport.
It's hard to read First Corinthians without sensing that.
I rather maintain that our enthusiasm is a hint.
It's a signal that there is something bigger.
Something much bigger.
Our team has already exited the World Cup.
John Isner is gone from Wimbledon.
But there is another glory.
It fadeth not away.

The Prayer at the Wedding

2010-06-18T04:15:00.000-07:00

““. . . the mother of Jesus said to Him, ‘They have no wine’.”
(John 2:3)

We inevitably remember the Wedding Feast at Cana as the story of Jesus’ first miracle.
John normally used the word “sign” to designate Jesus’ mighty acts, because he wished to emphasize the particular message clothed in the miracle. The water-to-wine miracle was Jesus’ first sign , but it was not the first display of His supernatural capacity in John’s gospel. He’d already displayed a miraculous knowledge of Nathaniel in chapter 1.
Jesus never indulged anything remotely like magic, and His miracles were never random or without a message. Every sign was like a little parable telling of His person, power and purpose. The episode at the wedding also carries a lesson about prayer, because the emergency was met by a miracle summoned by a prayer. The prayer was a marvel of succinctness hidden in the form of an observation. It was prayed by Mary who summed the situation up in four words:
“...they have no wine.”
We hear only an observation; Jesus, however, hears a request. How else are we to understand His answer in John 2:4: “Woman what am I to do with you, My time has not yet come”?
We will be helped in our understanding of the gospels if we remember that Jesus seldom responded to words alone; He responded rather to thoughts. Have you ever noticed how sometimes Jesus appears to utter a non sequitur—i.e., an answer apparently unrelated to the question or a comment apparently out of place in the context? We see this again later in chapter two when the authorities in Jerusalem challenge His right to cleanse the Temple. Jesus’ response to them was a little mysterious: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). But He was responding to their thoughts, as they were already thinking that He must die for opposing them.
We frequently use our words to throw a cloak over our true thoughts, but Jesus cuts through the artifice to address the real issue. Back to the wedding passage: if it were anyone else but the Lord, we would be tempted to think Mary was being treated with undue abruptness. After all, she was simply making an observation—or so it seemed on the surface. But the Lord is never interested in the surface. When He speaks to us, deep calls to deep. His response to Mary signals that what His mother may have wanted was some sort of disclosure of His full identity and office. The moment may have seemed propitious to her. But that the moment was premature is evident from His answer: “My time has not yet come.” When she speaks we can only hear an observation, but we can be sure that He heard a request. Characteristically she responds to His apparent rebuff with faith: she alerts the servants to be ready to obey His every command.
While we only hear a “no” in Jesus’ answer, Mary hears a “yes.” This is obvious from her response. She actually gives the servants the best counsel ever given in the history of the world: “Whatever He says to you: DO IT!” (John 2:5).
Perhaps Jesus did not do everything her heart could wish for. But He did something. And He met the need of the hour.
Now here is a remarkable thing and a lesson for every believer. What is our response when we believe God is telling us “no”? What do we do when we suspect He may not give us exactly what we want? The lesson from Mary, as relayed through her instructions to the servants, was simply this: if we think God is saying “no” to us we must be sure we are still saying say “yes” to Him. If we are disappointed, it is all the more urgent to insure that He is not disappointed.
Can we truthfully say that it is more important that we do what the Lord wants us to do than He do for us what we want Him to do? It’s no use pretending: our prayer life will only sustain one great burden. And while it’s certainly permitted to pray for God to act on our behalf, it’s a bad symptom if that one theme dominates our entire agenda.
Let us be confident that even if we can’t be sure He will give us what we want, He will do something. And that something will be a good thing and a better thing (though we may not see it) than what we asked. Let the burden of our prayer life be a determination to do what the Lord wants.
When we reach that place in prayer, we will witness the power of God. Indeed if we reach that place, we will have already witnessed it. The supply will be filled. The celebration will continue.
Just as it did at Cana.

The National Day of Prayer

2010-05-06T09:25:00.000-07:00

El Greco
Agony in the Garden

Much has been made of President Obama's non-participation in the National Day of Prayer on May 6th. The published reason for opting out is fear of offensiveness. Would that there were more fear of offending Almighty God.
As for prayer itself we must pray when we feel like it because motivation is a gift. We should also pray when we don't feel like it because apathy is a warning. ‘Pray without ceasing,’ the great Apostle wrote. Almost anything is easier than real prayer. The world, the flesh, and especially the devil rise up. We are opposed. I also know it's easier to teach on prayer than to pray. I think one mistake we make is to compartmentalize prayer and Bible study. When I read I can pray more and when I pray I can read more. It's like food and drink at table. One stimulates the other.
There is much to pray about. The United States is at war in two separate theatres. There’s an election in the UK today. Greece, the cradle of democracy, is bankrupt and on the verge of imploding. The Gulf of Mexico is awash with oil. And these are just the public concerns.
The private concerns of our heart compel prayer the more. Samuel Johnson wrote that a man is never so sincere as when he prays for himself. The health of our bodies, the solvency of our finances and the tranquility of our families dominate the prayer map for most of us. Does God not have our attention when there's a crisis with our children? You bet He does.
It's an eye-opener to survey the prayers and the exhortations to pray in the New Testament. The courage of personal witness, the strength to persevere, and the advance of the Kingdom are typical emphases. Comparing the New Testament prayer agenda to our own may be a convicting exercise.
There is much yet to be learned about prayer. The subject is replete with mystery. Our understanding will doubtless advance while we pray. When we consider what is offered in response to this great thing called prayer it is obvious that the promises are bigger than our realizations. I wonder if that's because a casual and cursory approach to prayer --like checking items off a list --is not really prayer at all. I remember being reproved after a sermon many years ago. I had remarked that we have no Revival because we have no prayer. A lady (with a reputation for godliness) asked how that could be true since she prayed for Revival-what exactly did I mean? I told her that the last real Revival in the West was the Welsh Revival of 1904-05. The Welshman Evan Roberts began praying in 1893. He would pray up to four hours a day and did so for eleven years. After eleven years the fire fell.
How different is my own prayer life from that of Evan Roberts. How different is my own languid offering from the agony which sweat blood in Gethsemane.
In any case prayer must be our own emphasis.
Oswald Chambers wrote "Prayer does not prepare for the great work. Prayer is the great work."
Prayer must be our priority. Martin Luther said "I have so much to do today I'll probably have to spend half the day praying."
Most importantly prayer is the way to nurture our relationship with the Lord.
That relationship is best served when we major on thanksgiving and praise rather than simply dropping off our list of things we want God to do for us today. Tell Him what you want, to be sure (Phil. 4:6), but major on thanking Him for what He's already done and praising Him for the same.
Come into His presence with singing and into His courts with praise.
He would be worthy of our worship were we not conscious of even one answered prayer.
Let us pray on the Day of Prayer then.
The Church of Jesus Christ advances on its knees.

The Number of Greats Diminished by One

2010-04-09T02:50:00.000-07:00

Mark Ashton July 18, 2009

Did you hear the story of the Pastor driving home from church lamenting to his wife that there simply were not many great preachers left in the world? She nodded sadly and informed him there was even one less than he thought.
Mark Ashton, Vicar of The Round Church meeting at St. Andrew the Great Cambridge, was a great preacher. Humility does not always adorn the pulpits of the great. But this was one of those rare impressive men who was wholly unimpressed with himself.
Mark entered heaven on what some Christians call Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter. April 3rd 2010. He was 62 years old.
I remember the exact date I first heard Mark preach. It was The Lord's Day 26 March, 2006. Easy to remember because it was our wedding anniversary and Jane was with me. We'd gone to another Cambridge Church in the morning, but we made it to STAG for the 5pm service. It was between terms so the students were away from Cambridge. You can imagine my surprise when we entered a church packed with young people. The music was wonderful. A spirit of worship prevailed in the congregation.
The minister approached the platform and proceeded to amaze me. He read from Numbers 19 and delivered a verse by verse exposition on the subject of the Red Heifer. THE RED HEIFER! From Numbers! In the context of successive expository messages though the Fourth Book of Moses. To young people mainly. In the 21st Century. To a packed house.
The sermon was magnificent.
I felt dazed and grateful.
I determined there and then that Mark Ashton would be my friend.
It was not unlike the doctrine of Election. He did not choose me; I chose him.
Later that summer we did ministry together with students in the Czech Republic.
Just before his diagnosis he agreed to come and minister in our church in Budapest, a prospect abandoned as the cancer closed in. His last sermons in January were from the Book of Acts.
Mark had the bearing and carriage of an athlete which, in fact, he was. His first degree was from Oxford but he later rowed for Cambridge where he took his theology degree. He was one of those robust personalities we have trouble associating with illness and death. There are few things harder to trust God with than this business of who dies early and who stays late. Who but God could discharge a responsibility so grave?
But we do trust Him, because we must trust Him.
But just because we trust, that doesn't mean we don't grieve.
And we grieve most deeply.

Your beauty O Israel is slain upon your high places
Tell it not in Gath
Publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon
I am distressed for you my brother
You were very pleasant to me
How are the mighty now fallen
While the battle rages still

Easter and the Point of it All

2010-04-04T12:27:00.000-07:00

He is Risen – The First Easter
Arthur Hughes (1893)

He is not here; for He is risen. Just as He said.
Matthew 28:6

The atheist protests that God (the One Who, by skeptic reckoning, was never there) should have created a far different world than the world we now have. I can fathom no reason why God should adjust His sovereignty to accommodate the bellowing of ranters. But in point of fact He did create a world which would be unrecognizable to us today.
In that Original Creation death was nowhere to be found. Everything teemed with life. Throbbing, pulsating, prolific life. Literally everything in that system collaborated for the sustenance of human happiness. The elements themselves, the beasts of the field, the things which creep and those micro-organisms invisible to our sight were either benign or salubrious in their impact on the health of human-kind.
In the first Garden death was a nullity unregistered in history or experience. Because it was unexperienced and unwitnessed it was a thing scarcely to be imagined. Death existed, if we may use the word 'existed' in such a manner, in only one place, and that place was the Word of God. More precisely death existed solely in a Warning by God. And that warning was localized in a Tree and the fruit which hung thereon. Eat of the fruit of that tree said the Lord and in the day you eat of it, dying you shall surely die.
Of course the world as it is today is precisely the opposite to what we have read of that Paradise of Innocents. Everything tends toward death. Every person ever born (Enoch and Elijah excepted) is either dead or will die. It is the one great commonality in our history and the one great certainty in our future.
Life after the grave, the triumph over death at the end, is found in only one place: In the Word of God. As far as our hope for life goes the Promise is localized upon one tree and the one Man who hung thereon. That tree was the Cross, and the Man Who died there is Jesus of Nazareth. It is only by faith believing God's Promise that death will be cheated and the grave plundered.
We will not here trace the various threads of evidence which lend credence to biblical miracles.
Our question is a simple one. Why was Christ raised? To give Him life? Not in the ultimate sense. Christ already possessed Life which was eternal, non-contingent and unalienable.
No man takes My life from Me. I lay it down. (John 10:18)
His resurrection was not necessary to secure His own life for the simple reason that His death was not necessary. It was rather voluntary.
The resurrection was necessary to secure life for the sinner.
He was raised for our justification.
Before the throne my Surety stands.
My name is written on His hands.
Christ is risen that I too may rise.
Having died with Him by faith I will reign with Him in glory.
Such is the promise, such are the prospects.
The warning went unheeded let not the promise go unclaimed.
Christ is risen as our hope.
There is no other recourse.
Nor would we want one if there could be.

Darkness at Noon

2010-04-02T10:52:00.001-07:00

Good Friday

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.
Matthew 27:45

The list of early adherents who later renounced Communism in the 20th Century is long. Some were disillusioned by the Ukrainian famine, others by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, still others by the hard fact (empirically demonstrated) that reality never measured up to theory. Many traced their awakening in memoirs: George Orwell, Whitaker Chambers, and Joy Davidman among others. One of the most prolific and profound of that number was Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian Jew who wrote 'The God that Failed.' His fictional account of the Moscow show trials was called 'Darkness at Noon’. Those trials were an exercise in judicial murder. Koestler's novel was an imaginary account of an historical tragedy.
Centuries earlier Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote historical accounts of a spiritual tragedy.
THE spiritual tragedy.
They too recorded a judicial murder.
They wrote of a day which really did know darkness at noon.
Christianity finds the fulcrum of its persuasive power in the real-time events of Crucifixion and Resurrection in Palestine at Passover in the First Century.
It is essential to the claims that the critical episodes unfolded in plain view. They were public spectacles. Jesus fed five thousand and appeared to five hundred. The fire fell on Jerusalem at Pentecost when the place was thronged with pilgrims. If you play at deception better to make the lie obscure and difficult of disputation.
But it wasn't deception.
That being the case, why, we may well ask, was the critical moment shrouded in darkness?
Scripture does not tell us outright but we may guess.
The first reason is DECORUM.
The Crucifixion was not simply the execution of the man Jesus. It was also the killing of our Maker. The crime was an attempt to uncreate the Creator. Imagine a book trying to annihilate its author. I know it's absurd. Absurd, but also monstrous. Unnatural, but also a travesty.
I submit that there is something beyond metaphor when Isaiah writes of the trees clapping their hands. Jesus speaks of the stones crying out and Paul informs us that creation groans. Poetic license merely? I think not. Enormous hints are being given.
Jesus would have remembered an original condition. And Paul was writing of a present reality.
Why was it dark?
It was dark because you don't wear bright colors to a wake.
CREATION WAS IN MOURNING.
It was only right for the sun to hide its face.

The second reason is DISCRETION.
One of the first foreshadowings of the dread day was the journey of Abraham and Isaac to Moriah. When they drew close the stricken father ordered those who accompanied them to stay behind. This was to be a family matter-something between father and son. The Covenant which brought our Redemption was ratified in Eternity Past before there were human witnesses. That plan was worked out at the Cross where the witnesses were uncomprehending. In the words of Jesus they simply did not know what they were doing.
Even with the sixty-six canonical books, even with two thousand years of the Holy Spirit's gracious disclosure to students of Scripture and their attendant theological reflection, there is much still beyond us. We stammer at the borders of human utterance. We bump up against the limits to human understanding. The astronomer strains to the capacity of the best telescope He concedes a nether darkness toward which the first stars flee. He can't see past them as they recede. We appreciate his position. We too would see more. God the Son has died. Tis mystery all, the Immortal dies. Human salvation has been secured by the cruelest of human sins Died He for me who caused His pain for me who Him to death pursued.
This is a transaction between God and God. Who can explore His strange design? In vain the first born seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. Amazing love how can it be? That Thou my God hast died for me.

It was dark that day between twelve and three.

The third reason is DECREE. It was required that the Passover Lamb be slain at twilight. (Exodus 12:3-6)
They hung Him high in the morning.
So God sent twilight to the middle of the day.
God's purpose could not be frustrated.
God's Law would not be broken.
Not in this Man's Life.
Not by this Man's Death.
He died in darkness that we might live in Light.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah
...for this Jesus.

Learning from Nationals

2010-04-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

Abram and Melchizedek
Peter Paul Reubens (1625)

Chaucer, Browning, Eliot and Paul Simon all wrote about April. This year April relieves a winter unusually rugged by European standards.
Like January, March ripped past while I was looking the other way. Our family has lots of March birthdays and anniversaries. Travel made the month a blur. I saw California's coast and the Pacific coast of China without ever crossing that ocean.
March ended on an up note. Yesterday the Daily Telegraph reported that Christopher Hitchens’ younger brother has written a repudiation of the atheistic rants which appear all too frequently from Christopher’s obnoxious pen. The Rage Against God is the name of the new work by Peter Hitchens, himself a former atheist. Since the book won’t be available till May 1st, I have no idea whether the effort is sufficiently biblical or even Christian. I was somewhat daunted by a comment in the pre-pub video. Peter suggests that Christopher is beginning to soften. But the only evidence he offers is that the atheist has quit smoking. Self-preservation is always a wise policy for an atheist, but it doesn’t necessarily signal a move toward theism. Still, news of the forthcoming book is exciting, and it gives us hope of better things from the Hitchens family.

March leaves me with another positive memory.
Missionaries are supposed to teach, not just so we can leave behind students but so we can leave teachers in place long after we depart .It's an exquisite feeling to learn from someone who once learned from us. One Hungarian I work with often gifts me that experience. I baptized him over 20 years ago. Now he takes me to school.
Whenever I meet with a National I nearly always ask, “Tell me what you’re learning in Scripture." When I ask this particular friend I always reach for my notebook.
This last time he took me to Deuteronomy 17. (You remember Deuteronomy 17 don't you?)
In that place Moses is instructing Israel on the ways of kings, warning against false hopes for success as a nation.
First he warns against the tendency of kings to depend on military prowess. "...he shall not multiply horses to himself." v.16. Thus the key for Israel would not be military.
Then he mentions the false hope of political alliances."Neither shall he multiply wives to himself..." v.17. Presumably the motive for multiplying wives was not merely biological. It was the habit of those ancient monarchs to forge alliances by marrying the sisters and daughters of foreign rulers.
Moses intimates that security for Israel could not be gained in that way. Inter-marriage among European ruling houses was especially fashionable in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It proved no safeguard against World War I --which George Will called "The war to save the world from Queen Victoria's grandson."
Finally Moses warns against the hoarding of wealth- a tendency definitely not limited to kings. "... neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold." (v. 17b)
If a nation is not to hope in strength along military, political or economic lines where exactly does strength come from?
"It shall be when he sits upon the throne of his Kingdom that he shall... copy this law in a book...and it shall be with him. and he shall read therein all the days of his life; that he may learn to fear the Lord his God...that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, that he may prolong his days in the Kingdom, he, and his children , in the midst of Israel."
It's a wonderful lesson is it not?
Not only for Kingdoms but for ministries, and for families.
What a pity that it's a lesson universally unheeded.
It's a thing worth noting that Jesus vanquished the tempter in the wilderness by quoting two passages in Deuteronomy. Having been given food will we not take it in? Having been given armor will we not put it on?
More tomorrow during THIS HOLY WEEK.

February Already

2010-02-13T10:45:00.001-08:00

January flew by as a month unremarked upon. I was distracted by a short trip to the Mid-East in the middle and travel to the US at the end. It would have been hard to write in January without mentioning Haiti. The last entry of 2009 was taken up with suffering. I found the prospect of an encore daunting. Sometimes it's better to simply weep and pray and leave the commentary to others. We've long heard that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. How do we conceive of those who have nothing losing everything? New Orleans bounced from Katrina to the Super Bowl. It's difficult to conceive of Haiti bouncing anywhere very high.

Years ago I had contact with a brilliant RAF officer, eccentric, unmarried and a believer. He was a Cambridge graduate and a fluent Russian speaker. At a wedding we both attended at the Air Force Academy he was holding forth (apropos of what I can't remember) on the subject that Haiti was dedicated to the devil at its founding. That was news to me and I never thought about it again until I heard that some were attributing Haiti's earthquake to its alleged diabolical origins.

Linking specific suffering to specific sins is a hazardous enterprise at best. Unless the link is direct (as in crime/punishment, drunkenness/accident etc) I think proving a connection is beyond the scope of human competence. There are innocents who have no knowledge or sympathy with the darker components of Haiti's founding (or their parents' HIV or something similar) who suffer dreadfully. And there are those who sin dreadfully who seem to be eluding immediate consequences in the short run. Suffice to say that in these mortal bodies, on this fallen planet, suffering is our lot until the coming of the Son of Man. Even so come quickly Lord Jesus.

The snow is heaped high here. I am in Budapest and Jane is in Florida. Good for her but a tough Valentine's Day assignment for me. One of our best memories as a couple is taking the train from Munich to Vienna on February 14, 1986, on our first visit to Austria. It's a five hour run through some beautiful countryside. It was snowing that day and the train stopped in St. Valentine Austria, a city whose existence I knew nothing about until the train pulled into the station.

Christians may overlook or underestimate romantic love. But it's a nearly overwhelming thing which has inspired the forlorn, the sublime and the dastardly for all our history. The Bible first mentions such love in describing what Jacob endured for Rachel.

The first mention of any kind of love in the Bible bears no trace of the romantic. Nor is it, as we would guess, the love of God for man or the love of man for God. It is rather the love of a father for a son in the most excruciating of contexts.

"Take now your son, your only son, the son whom you love..."

Genesis 22:2

When we take it upon ourselves to ask how a Son infinitely loved could be a Son actually sacrificed we begin to gaze upon the heart of Reality.

We begin to get at the root of things.

Now may the romance of Valentines compensate for the cold of February.

And if romance seems no part of your life remember that the Gospel itself is a romance.

The Church is, after all, a Community Betrothed.

If we are not consciously and conscientiously awaiting the Heavenly Bridegroom the only thing we've missed is the point.

So let us wait with longing and with faith.

We expect the consummation of the greatest Romance (theological not biological).

I am quite sure the weather will improve as well.

The Vapour of this Little Time

2009-12-31T02:15:00.000-08:00

‘The Entombment’ by Daniele Crespi 1620’s

“For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time,
and then vanisheth away.” James 4:14 (AV)

I write within 24 hours of the death of a friend. I write on New Year’s Eve. I inflate my connection by calling him my friend. I think we only ever talked about Kentucky basketball. I was pastor to his missionary family during their Budapest years. He died when his truck left the road early yesterday morning in Atlanta. He was twenty-two. He knew the Lord Christ savingly. Dear God, what a difference that makes.

When we contemplate the Being of God we are inevitably staggered by mysteries, complexities, impossibilities. Eternity, Infinity, Trinity. Try wrapping your brain around that. Yet the moral dimension of God’s character is also a mystery to fallen flesh. Our vantage point is clouded. Our judgment is corrupt. The primary theological enterprise in the moral realm is the accommodation of our understanding of divine goodness to our experience of human pain. Grace is sorely needed. We would like more answers. We would like more faith. It is harder to be orthodox when our hearts are crushed.

I knew another young man, the son of intimate friends, who died in 2009. It is a fellowship with God, a stewardship from God which no one wants, this business of losing sons.

God will not prove His love for us by preventing the suffering or death of someone we love. I did not say He would not protect those we love. Is there anyone we care about still alive and prospering? It is because God protects them. We believe in Providence. I said God will not prove His love to us by Providence.

I did not say we cannot ask God to protect those we love. We believe in prayer. I said that God will not prove His love for us by answered prayer.

I make these emphatic declarations for the simple reason that God proves His love in a way quite different. He proves His love by refusing to protect the One He loves.

“He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all,
will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” Romans 8:32

To doubt God’s love when those we care about are taken is to deem the crucifixion of God’s only Son an insufficient demonstration of favor. Of course we don’t mean to. But sorrow is a suffocating thing.

Probably the greatest thing, the hardest thing, we trust God with is who dies first and who dies next. The best man in the world once cried out,
“O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom!
Would God that I had died instead of thee…” 2 Samuel 18:33

We want to insist that heaven be adorned exclusively with the aged. We want to, but we can’t.

If I knew what God knows, and I do not, and if I were good, and I am not, I would do what God does. I would allow what God allows.

2009 is soon gone.
So shall our lives be.
It is therefore all the more urgent that we secure a life which cannot be forfeited.
A life purchased by the Dread Ransom of the Blood Royal.
We draw One Year Closer.

The Clothes God Wears

2009-12-24T00:19:00.000-08:00

..and she brought forth her first-born Son and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes
Luke 2:7

Clothes are important. Clothes may be an expression of character, an insignia of rank, or an index of economic station. Clothes are also a consequence of the Fall. Practically the first question asked by the first human pair after the Fall was, "What shall we wear?" Of course their solution was inadequate. It was God, newly offended, newly estranged, who provided the covering. Even that covering was temporary. The great theological term 'atonement' is taken from the simple Hebrew word for 'covering.' That first physical covering provided by God for Adam and Eve foreshadowed the spiritual atonement only God Himself could provide.
On the Island of Patmos John sees and reports that the glorified Second Person is "clothed in a robe reaching to His feet and girded about His breast with a golden girdle." (Revelation 1:13) Quite a contrast to the swaddling clothes. The Son of Man came unclothed into the world and had to be covered. The Lord Jesus would make atonement for sinners by becoming a substitute for them. That meant being uncovered Himself.
At the Cross He was stripped.
Before they put Him on the Cross they gave Him a crown of thorns. Before they put Him on the Cross they took His covering. While he hung there they gambled for His clothes. Thorns are an emblem of the curse -another consequence of the Fall. He took the curse upon His head. He gave the covering off His back.
In Bethlehem His back was covered
Deity was swaddled and laid down.
He came to make His blessings flow.
Far as the curse is found.

Mythology and History

2009-12-22T12:32:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I was reading an on-line article in the Times of London. It was written by Jeremy Clarkson, a regular who normally writes about automobiles. This time he was writing a review of Bob Dylan’s Christmas CD. Though I was a Bob Dylan fanatic in my (long ago) youth I don’t think I could bring myself to listen to a Bob Dylan Christmas CD.I much admired more than one of Dylan’s early voices but even early on I enjoyed hearing Peter Paul and Mary rescue Bob Dylan’s songs from Bob Dylan’s voice. (We lost Mary Travers in 2009. A lamentable subtraction that.) Still I loved Dylan’s sneering scornful intonations so well suited for classics like Positively Fourth Street and Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan’s voice has significantly degenerated over the years (a thing Jane always maintained was impossible). Now, in my dotage, I can’t bear the thought of Silent Night in any of Dylan’s voices though I’m glad he at least wants to do something for Christmas.
But it’s Clarkson I’m interested in at the moment not Dylan. And Jeremy Clarkson regards both Dylan and Christmas with boundless cynicism. He insists that most people (right thinking people which of course includes himself) regard all the Christmas nonsense as a fairy-tale. He may be correct to insist that most of our contemporaries regard the biblical account in just that way. But he embraces error if he takes his stand with the majority.
Fairy tales usually begin something like this:
Long ago and far away…
But this story starts out when Caesar Augustus (63 BC-14 AD) was Emperor of Rome. To narrow it down a bit more it was during that part of Augustus’ reign when Quirinius (51 BC-21AD) was governor of Syria. I‘m aware that there is a controversy about the date of Quirinius’ rule. If you are aware of the controversy I subscribe to the two term solution. Then there is the matter of place. It happened in Bethlehem. Travel south-east from Rome. When you reach latitude 31 degrees 05 North and Longitude 34 degrees 48East you're in Jerusalem. Hang a right and take the road south. Almost anyone will be able to tell you which road. Five miles and you're there. It's a real place.
Have you ever noticed how some of the most apparently impossible (all miracles are impossible without God. That's part of what 'miracle' means) of Jesus' miracles are either public (e.g. the feeding of the 5000) or are amply fortified with authenticating detail? Surely the greatest miracles are the resurrections. Apart from Jesus' own resurrection we have three reports in the Gospel accounts. You will recall the case of Jairus’ daughter. Jairus was a synagogue ruler in Galilee. Synagogue rulers in Galilee were not exactly thick on the ground back then. (There were probably only about 50 houses in first century Nazareth). If the report were false it would have been easily repudiated. Then there was the widow of Nain’s son. Nain was a tiny village. There could have been only one widow there about that time whose son predeceased her. If such an event took place every resident of Nain would have known all about it. It would have been madness to make the thing up if it didn't happen. Then there was the raising of Lazarus. Not everyone in Jerusalem would have known someone in Bethany (though it was quite close by), but it’s a good bet everyone in Bethany would have known someone in Jerusalem. And everyone in Bethany would have known either Mary or Martha or Lazarus. If it were claimed that Lazarus was raised from the dead, and he was not, in fact raised, it would have been a particularly damaging lie, a lie useless to perpetuate. If these claims were lies why were enough details supplied to make it possible for the claims to be disproved? In 1872 a German archaeological team digging in Bethany unearthed a family burial crypt 18 centuries old. The tomb was sealed. Upon the seal were three names: Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Fairy tales do not normally leave artifacts in the ground.
But back to the birth narrative. For a skeptic, among the most difficult things to choke down in the Creation and Nativity accounts are the claims about Eve and Mary. At the beginning of the Old Testament sin entered the world because the first woman was deceived by the devil and did his bidding. The New Testament begins when a Virgin girl supernaturally conceives without male agency and gives birth to a Child who is, in fact, the Son of God. By secular reasoning it’s a pretty far stretch on the face of it. But let’s not leave it at a superficial level. If the two accounts are myths why is the import of the second myth so contradictory to the first myth? What possible motive or mindset originated and perpetuated the contradiction? What I mean by contradiction is simply this. Women were universally marginalized and trivialized in the ancient world. This was painfully true among the Jews even until comparatively recent times. One of the three things a pious Jew thanked God for was that he was not a woman. That it was naïveté on the part of a woman which effected the entrance of sin into the world is not surprising even if we regard the story as mythological. But what of Mary’s role in birthing Jesus? SHE brought forth HER first born. The woman is the star. Not THEIR first born HER first born. I am Protestant. I do not believe it is either desirable or wise to assign to Mary a role larger than what Scripture declares, but even by the most modest Protestant estimates her stature is gigantic. See how Woman is elevated. See how spectacularly God’s favor rests upon her in contradistinction to the males in the cast of players. See how she shines. But whence cometh this shining? And why? Of course it seems a commonplace role for a woman in our feminist generation but in first century Jewish culture it constitutes a glaring anachronism. Unless...unless the provenance of the story is neither naturalistic nor mythological.
And it was not. Nor could it have been.

The Festival of the Born King (Part 2)

2009-12-19T23:15:00.000-08:00

Where is He Who is BORN the King of the Jews?
Matthew 2:2

This is an elaboration of the theme for the Christmas reflection of 2008 slightly different, somewhat expanded. We never get to the end of this story do we?

Even David was not born King of the Jews. Nor Saul nor Solomon. Hardly anyone is actually BORN a King. Hardly anyone at all.
Victoria was not born a Queen. She became Queen a month after her 18th birthday. When she was born George III was on the throne. Her son Edward VII was not born a King. When he was born his mother was on the throne. She was also on the throne when her grandson and great grandson George V and George VI were born. No one is born a King or Queen. You must wait. One day, when it's time, he or she ascends the throne.
Herod was a tyrant with strong views about who should be King. He believed there should be no successors on the horizon or in the imagination. His two unusually winsome sons, Alexander and Aristobolus not only made a great impression in the provinces but were justly celebrated in Rome as well. Their celebrity flamed the paranoia of a father who dispatched them with assassins. His own sons! Can you imagine entering Jerusalem to extol a fresh rival to Herod? Herod was not born a King. He was not even born a Jew. He was an Idumean. He converted to Judaism to make his reign more palatable. He kept a Kosher table. It was said that Herod's pigs were more safe than Herod's sons (a play on words in Greek).
Only faith or courage or ignorance or insanity would have moved anyone to enter Jerusalem to inquire about another King, a higher King, a King born as King. These Magi were moved by divine impulse. They sought a King attended by stars
There was only one King Who brought a Crown to His birth. There was only one Who stooped to a human throne, One Who condescended.
That King bartered power for weakness with informed consent fully apprised of consequences.
That King was born in Bethlehem.
Born on Christmas Day.

Birthday of a Phenomenon

2009-12-19T04:15:00.000-08:00

Martyn Lloyd-Jones (December 19, 1899-March 1, 1981)

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was born this day in Cardiff 110 years ago, the year Dwight L. Moody died. In my opinion he was the greatest expository preacher in English in the 20th Century. He was one of three sons born to Henry Lloyd-Jones a Welsh dairyman who moved his family to London during Martyn's childhood. His story is remarkable because of what he walked away from and the brilliant effectiveness he sustained as an auto-didact. As for ministry preparation he was entirely self-taught with no formal theological training.
He qualified in medicine and a brilliant career loomed. One of the Medical Professors at St. Bartholomew's Hospital where he trained was Lord Thomas Horder the most famous doctor in Britain. Lord Horder was the physician to Prime Ministers and the glitterati of London society. He was also Physician-in-Waiting to the King. His fame rested largely on the fact that as King Edward VII lay dying, in 1910, he called for Lord Horder. During his training M L-J disputed a diagnosis of the great man. L-J was able to make his diagnosis by a manual external probing of the patient’s spleen, something Horder was not able to do. Time proved the student right and the teacher wrong. Though Horder was not a Christian, he responded with magnanimity and invited L-J to join his prestigious Harley Street practice upon graduation. At about the same time (1926) L-J married Bethan Phillips, the only child of a Welsh doctor and a physician in her own right. As women physicians were rare in those days one can only guess at how over-qualified she must truly have been.
Sometime in his student days Martyn Lloyd-Jones came to know Christ personally. A sense of a call to ministry began to grow. One hundred per-cent of his counselors urged him to stay in medicine, though some suggested medical missions. His own pastor at Charing Cross Welsh Chapel assured him that if he had his life to live over he would have been a physician! It was during the Christmas season that the crisis came. Some honeymooning friends from Wales visited the recently married Lloyd-Jones' in London. The two couples decided to attend the Theatre. Exiting the performance a Salvation Army band approached ringing their bells and beating their drums. Some would be understandably embarrassed as the shabbily dressed gospelers drew close to the fashionable West End theatre crowd in their furs and finery. At that moment Martyn Lloyd-Jones realized he KNEW. The juxtaposition of the two competing fellowships was overpowering. Later he compared the experience to the scene in Wagner's Tannhäuser when there is a call from the Pilgrims competing against the pull of the world. Looking upon the down market evangelists M L-Jones said that he realized "These are my people" Looking upon his fellow theatre goers he realized, "These are not my people."
Immediately he resigned his Medical Practice and left London for a struggling Mission Church in a poor Welsh mining town called Aberavon. The decision must have been excruciating because his wife gave up her career as well. It was all the more surprising because they realized later that she wasn't a Christian at the time.
He stayed in Wales for 12 years before becoming G. Campbell-Morgan's co-Pastor at Westminster Chapel in London (near Buckingham Palace) in 1939. He became Senior Minister in 1943. He never had a formal welcome to the church because the weekend he began England declared war on Germany. He never had a formal goodbye because he resigned quickly in 1968 due to impending heart surgery. His ministry was remarkable for many reasons including:
1) He preached the Bible, verse by verse through books, a rare thing in those days. Even Spurgeon hadn't done that.
2) He resurrected and relished the powerfully theologized pulpit emphases of the Reformers and the Puritans whose doctrines he loved and whose holiness he imitated.
3) He was an activist who catalyzed movements. He helped Inter-Varsity in their critical early days. He helped bring the Evangelical Library to London and established the Westminster Conference, an annual lecture series on Puritan history and theology. He encouraged the launch of the Banner of Truth Trust in 1957, the foremost publisher of Puritan and Reformed literature in the world.
4) Although he published little while in active pastoral ministry after his retirement a steady stream of books began to flow.
He was not perfect. He could be hard to get along with. And he could be narrow. One of the first things he did at Westminster Chapel was to abolish the choir. His book Joy Unspeakable (published posthumously without his oversight) shows that even a great mind and arduous study cannot always compensate entirely for a lack of theological training.
But he was a giant and a great man.
He should always be studied.
My own favorites are his expositions of Roman 5 and volume two of Romans 8.
Real experts on his writings usually list ‘Spiritual Depression’ and ‘Studies in the Sermon on the Mount’ in the first rank.
He should always be honored.
It would be hard to imagine 20th Century evangelicalism without him. We would have been much the poorer; of that there can be no doubt.
May God be praised for giving him to the Church.
And may God raise up more like him before it's too late.

Christmas as an Evangelistic Opportunity

2009-12-17T06:06:00.000-08:00

Christmas is one of the easiest times to talk about the Lord Jesus. He is, after all, the whole point, though it's easy for the point to be lost in the froth of the inconsequential. If the percentage of Christians who share their faith on a regular basis is a trustworthy gauge, then apparently talking about Jesus is not easy. It's not as if we need a special reason to bring up the Creator of the Universe from time to time with those who owe Him every breath and heartbeat. If we have specific commands from God, do we need special concessions from sinners? I think not. It is not as if the Lord said, “Go out into all the world and wait for the right moment.”
We will do well, though, to consider how best to begin. Many Christians feel the need to engage the unbeliever on neutral ground at first and then hope for a segue which doesn't jar or alienate. May all who opt for indirect approaches be fruitful in evangelistic labor. But a direct approach attracts me most.
"Have you ever heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?" is a question blessed in my generation."If you were to die tonight do you know for certain that you would go to heaven?" is the first of two diagnostic questions made popular by D. James Kennedy. The second question is "What would you say to God if He asked you why He should let you into His heaven?"As an unbeliever Dr. Kennedy heard those words spoken on the radio by a Philadelphia Pastor named Donald Grey Barnhouse. It seems likely that Barnhouse learned the approach from CH Spurgeon who asked the questions to his cab driver in 19th century London. The cabs were pulled by horses in those days. People get along in cabs much faster now. But they still get to heaven or hell at pretty much the same pace and by the same familiar routes. Our apathy or activism may play a role in hastening progress in one direction or another.
"Have you ever thought about becoming a follower of Jesus of Nazareth?" is my own favorite opening. No hidden agenda there. No wasted time. That way the Holy Spirit can bring honor to the Name of Jesus from the outset.
Whether the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ we follow with "Would you allow me to tell you how I began to follow and why I've never regretted that step?"
If we don't speak of the Lord at Christmas when will we speak of the Lord?
If not now when?
If not ourselves, who then?
How will they believe unless they hear?
Because the Lord has come we go.
I relish all the down-time at Christmas.
But Christ did not come to make us passive.

The Incarnation

2009-12-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

;...and the Word became flesh." John 1:14

Less than two weeks until Christmas.
When we were children it pained us that Christmas came so slow. Now that we are adults, it surprises us that it comes so fast.
The Incarnation is a permanent thing.
God Became Man.
When Jesus was born on earth He never ceased to be God. When He ascended into heaven He never ceased to be Man.
It is a Man (God too, of course) who intercedes for us at the Father's right hand.

"For there is one God and one Mediator between God and man, the MAN, Christ Jesus..." (I Timothy 2:5).

Strong comfort that. He was touched by our infirmities. He KNOWS. Not by some remote intellectual knowing but by the knowledge of shared experience. He is Immanuel, God with us. He knows what it is like to live in a fallen place (with 'mosquitoes, tapeworms and rabies' in the words of Vern Poythress' apt summary). He knows us not as an astronomer knows a planet by peering through a telescope. He knows us as a Son knows a family by being conceived in a human womb and sleeping in a crowded room.

He came to set His people free ---far as the curse is found. And the curse is found everywhere.

There is no patch under the sun uncontaminated by the curse of sin. He provides the antidote by swallowing the poison Himself. He tasted death for every man. He was born with us that He might die for us.
And so He did.
O come let us adore Him.
Born the King of Angels.

The Way Jesus Launched

2009-11-02T07:18:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I was talking with someone who knows a lot more about Christian ministry than I. Such folk are not hard to find, but this mentor is especially sagacious, and I relish his insights. We were lamenting the tendency of one celebrated and wildly successful (if numbers, popularity and resources count as success) Christian group to focus almost exclusively on the fashionable and the well heeled. My friend noted that Jesus practiced the exact opposite. For proof he cited that incident in the region of Gadara on the far side of the lake. You will remember that the case involved madmen, demons and pigs. Decorous it was not.
I thought back to that conversation as I spent a little time in Matthew 8 and 9 yesterday.
The Sermon on the Mount stretches across the whole of Matthew 5-7, preceded by the Temptation in Chapter 4 and the Baptism in Chapter 3. Working our way back to Chapter 2 we are already at the Birth Narrative. So effectively the beginning of Jesus’ ministry proper, at least after that stunning inaugural sermon, commences at Matthew 8.
How then does He begin?
What emphases does He foreshadow?
Is there an intentional (could Jesus ever be unintentional?) pattern here meant as a model for us?
Those initial signals constitute a kind of gauntlet thrown down. He begins by cleansing a leper. Then He heals a Centurion’s servant from a distance after offering to enter the man’s home. While that Centurion had gained some favor with the Jews he was still a Gentile and an occupier. Jesus extols the Gentile’s faith noting that it was especially praiseworthy compared to the faith of Israel. This from the Jewish Messiah! Impolitic that. Not at all what was expected. At the beginning of Chapter 9 Jesus calls the author of the First Gospel, Matthew himself, to become a member of the Twelve. He thus renders permanent His association with the despised for the balance of His biological Life. His was not a perfunctory ministry to the outcast. He actually invited a tax-collector to live with Him and become His permanent envoy.
Can we see a pattern yet?
He appears to actually favor the Low and the Loathed.
Do you think these memoirs were contrived?
Impossible!!!
If these accounts were spun from fancy they would have been crafted in a far different way.
The agenda of Jesus of Nazareth did not originate in the First Century.
The language of Jesus of Nazareth was not originally spoken on this planet.
And that was just the way He started out.
Outreach to fallen women, Samaritans and the Zaccheus-like wretches of the earth follow in their turn.
Chesterton said we ought to sing “Glory to God in the Lowest” when we hail the coming of this Christ.
He seemed always to specialize in the unfashionable and the counterintuitive.
In Chapter 8 we learn that Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Mark informs us that about the same time the paralytic was lowered from a roof rudely peeled off someone’s home. That house was likely Peter’s. Would it be amiss to imagine that Simon Peter may have been among that vast number of the married and the male who secretly prefer a healthy roof to a healthy mother-in-law? The very presence of Jesus seemed always to precipitate the unexpected. And often the uninvited. That’s one reason we’re sure the Gospel accounts were not made up. Men don’t make up that which they cannot imagine. The life and teaching of Jesus would have settled no First Century controversy in a hoped for direction. He vindicated no cherished position. He enfranchised no school of thought.
The message He brought, the model He showed pleased neither the Scribes nor the Pharisees. Not the Herodian or the Sadduccee, neither the Essene nor the Zealot would have been attracted to His teaching. Their prior convictions and commitments ruled out such a possibility. Only an Anna here or a Simeon there would have been pleased, and those two rare and worthy ones were in heaven well before He approached young manhood.
No, the thing cannot have been contrived.
“Cui bono?” the ancients sometimes asked. For whose good? Who would have profited from the doctrine and actions of this Jesus?
Nobody.
No one but the hopeless sinner.
None but the Sovereign God.

The Capital of Darkness

2009-10-29T02:57:00.000-07:00

Last week Jane and I traveled to Krakow, the beautiful “Little Prague”, on the Vistula, Poland’s former capital and home to John-Paul II. While there I spent an afternoon at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp.
Auschwitz is one of those places many want to visit once and nobody wants to visit twice. I was amazed at the size of the crowds so late in the season.
Samuel Johnson said that we are more concerned about a pain in our little fingers than the suffering of thousands we do not know. In the main I suspect he was right. The exception may be Auschwitz. It marks us. It inspires a kind of ultimate sobriety and changes the way we look at the world. We’ve grown accustomed to endless analyses of the Holocaust and its lessons. Still the lessons should not be ignored. We may uncover new lessons if we refuse to forget.
1) Anti-Semitism in any form is a thing to be opposed. This species of iniquity is particularly malignant and has a tendency to metastasize quickly. And anti-Semitism is still alive and well in Eastern Europe. A European poll conducted a few years back showed that a plurality of Europeans believe that Israel is the chief cause of terrorism. One of Hungary’s two major parties, appealing at one level because it champions more conservative and religious causes, still fosters a dark tolerance of anti-Semitism. This alone is sufficient ground for the Christian to withhold support.
2) Of course Hitler did not reserve his malice exclusively for the Jews. Thousands of Slavs and Gypsies were murdered at Auschwitz and other camps. Secular saviors tend to become advocates of liquidation sooner or later. It is likely that his racial obsessions cost him the War. The Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans as liberators. That soon changed when the Nazis treated them as sub humans because they were Slavs. The Germans lost a valuable ally who could have turned the tide against Russia. Had Jewish genius been enlisted on the side of Germany it is hard to imagine Germany losing. But if the Nazis had honored the Jews they wouldn’t have been Nazis
3) The capacity for human evil is apparently unlimited. You know you are beginning to think theologically when you hear the phrase “The Fall” and think of Genesis 3 instead of Autumn. We are fallen. The sin nature asserts itself. If that nature proceeds unrelieved by regeneration and the restraining power of the Holy Spirit the consequences can be dire. Cicero remarked that in war all law is suspended, but there’s no doubt that the Nazis would have continued their extermination program after the war. Dachau was built before the war began. Our potential for wickedness is staggering. Chesterton wrote that it is surprising that the doctrine of human depravity is so universally rejected because it is the one Christian doctrine which can be proved empirically.

4) To sin against spiritual light and privilege invites woeful results. The Germans as a nation were the first to embrace the Bible through the Reformation. It may be claimed that they were also the first to reject biblical authority through Liberal Theology and the Higher Criticism. It’s only fair for a fiercely Protestant observer like myself to note that the Nazis appropriated many of Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish rants for their own purposes. I have no inclination to defend Luther on this score except to quote his biographer Roland Bainton who pointed out that most of those abysmal utterances came in the last two years of Luther’s life when he had, in Bainton’s words, “lost his emotional poise.”
5) We may thank God for the noble few who stood up. We remember the Dutch family who sheltered Ann Frank. Corrie ten Boom and her sister stand out. At Munich University there were those intrepid students called The White Rose, who along with Professor Kurt Huber, were decapitated for their courage. Let us note that 40,000 Germans were executed for opposing the regime including the heroic Dietrich Bonhoeffer who could have saved himself at the end by playing along with Himmler’s plan to make a separate peace with the Allies. He refused and was hung for his principles.

Religion itself is no cure for the world’s murderous tendencies. It is a false religion which convulses the world as I write. It was a professedly religious people who insisted that the Savior be crucified. Pilate, the representative of the secular power was quite satisfied to beat Jesus and let Him go. And let us be honest. Untold savagery has been prosecuted in the name of Christ in the history of the world.
But those who use the name of Christ as a pretense for slaughter do not employ the doctrine of Christ Who laid down His life for the nations.
The Lord gives us no promise that there will not be another Holocaust, perhaps next time directed against Christians. We are only assured of wars and rumors of wars. No vague religious sentiment or specific religious enterprise will help. It is that personal relationship entered into by faith in Christ’s promises which we need. The specific trust in Jesus that leads to actual Christ-likeness is the only hope for us as individuals.
Corporately the only hope is the actual return of Jesus Himself.
It can’t come too soon for me.

The Mustering of the Host

2009-09-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

“The Lord of Hosts is mustering a host for battle.” Isaiah 13:4

One day I may write a book called “Errors of the Quiet Time.” It would be mainly autobiographical. My qualifications as author include an habitual underachievement in the devotional realm. It is something I wish to mend.

One error is coming to prayer keen to involve God in my plan. Most will know Bill Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws, the most effective evangelistic tool of my generation. As a new Christian it was one of the first things I was taught. As an older Christian it may be the last thing I learn. The first law reads, “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” I fear I often imperfectly incorporate that truth into my approach to God.

Too often I treat God as a prospect for my current enthusiasms. It is as if I say: “Dear God, I know you love me, therefore I’m sure you’ll want to bless my plan.” Thus Law One is turned upon its head.

How can we forget that God has a plan?

In January I wrote of God The Amazing Star-Breather (Louie Giglio’s term). Louie masterfully expounded the theme of God the Creator--the God who fills the vastness of the inter-stellar reaches and fashions the stars in their magnitude. Let us also remember that God manages the microcosm, including that microcosm called me. He manages the microcosm of my days and nights. The God who has a plan for eternity has a plan for the hours. Let us then celebrate The God who Numbers Hairs on Heads, The Knower of Sparrows, The Tailor to Lilies. As we get to know this God, we will discover His plan for us.

When I began the Christian life it felt like enrolling in a class. As I go on it feels more like preparing for a war. Years ago I heard a professor lecture about the run-up to the Trojan War. He told of the enlistment phase. There was reluctance on the part of the Greek champions to risk their safety for an unfortunate husband in pursuit of a faithless wife. Odysseus, the most resourceful, feigned madness, while Achilles, the manliest among them, disguised himself as a woman! After being unmasked by Agamemnon, both Odysseus and Achilles took their places in the expedition to Troy. Classical scholars have a name for that enlistment phase. They call it The Mustering of the Host.

The Great Apostle compares the Christian life to the life of a soldier (2 Timothy 2:4). With those who rise early to march and to fight, we share a kindred calling. In its current and cosmic phase Christian experience takes on the shape of battle. As I read the reports of the G-20 Summit and the speeches before the U.N. General Assembly, I thought of Psalm 2. The heathen rage and the peoples imagine a vain thing. The rulers still take counsel against the Lord and against His anointed. What are the toxic rants of Gadhafi and Achmedenejad but a raging? There are those who submit to God’s rule. Most do not. We are a minority against the armed and the powerful. God’s plan for us may necessarily include collisions. Our part is not to take the life of another. We are advanced beyond Old Testament warfare. We are New Testament believers. Our weapons are of a different kind (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). We take up our life to lay it down.

A few step forward boldly. Others must be wooed. Some shrink back.
So it is in the world. So it is in the Church.
May we enlist among the eager.
When we do God will reveal His plan and assign our role.

We go with those sensitive to God’s honor and jealous for God’s glory.
May our sense of privilege be obvious.
We start at break of day.
That’s when the muster begins.

Five Things About September 1rst

2009-09-01T04:23:00.001-07:00

‘He maketh peace in thy borders…’ Psalm 147:14

It’s a beautiful September morning in the old Hungarian capital. We hope to visit Krakow this month, perhaps next week. A missionary who was in our wedding lives there and we’ve never been.
Seventy years ago today Adolph Hitler fulfilled his own wish to visit Poland. Before daylight that morning he sent 40 divisions over the frontier and the Second World War was on .It was less than 21 years after the Armistice which ended the previous war.

What have we learned?
1) There will always be war. Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of wars. Jesus also declared the poor would always be with us. At the beginning of the 20th Century many of the most celebrated thinkers in the English-speaking world (men like HG Wells and Bernard Shaw) believed that the end of war and poverty was not only possible but near. The great hope was socialism. The founding of the Soviet state appeared to those people to make that dream even more plausible. How did a Galilean Carpenter born in the First Century know more about the 20th Century than the leading intellectual lights who entered the 20th Century as adults?
My guess is that it is because long before He made anything in that Nazareth shop He made the world and everything in it.
2) Pacifism is an admirable ideal. It is seldom a practical possibility. A very high percentage of European Christians are pacifists. Our greatest living preacher (my opinion) is a pacifist, a unilateralist and was a conscientious objector in WW II. His name is John Stott. Nearly all Eastern European and Russian Christians are against capital punishment. There are good historical reasons for that. But should our fathers and grandfathers have allowed Hitler to kill ALL the Jews, ALL the Gypsies, and All the courageous people in Germany who stood up? Should Hitler have been allowed to enslave all the Slavs? Would it have been better if we had not even tried to rescue Ann Frank and Dietrich Bonhoeffer before they perished? Is that what God wanted? I don’t think so. It would be possible to make a nearly airtight New Testament case for pacifism were it not for one verse: “… he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” It’s a position we don’t normally associate with Jesus but there it is in Luke 22:36. While we are in Krakow we will make the obligatory visit to Auschwitz. The place holds a lesson which begs to be mastered.
3) Some forms of evil are intransigent. Perhaps I should say that evil by its very nature is intransigent. Hitler could not be TALKED out of Austria, the Sudetenland, Prague or the Danzig corridor. He had to be evicted by force.
4) Moral clarity is elusive in war. Both sides accumulate considerable guilt. Stalin helped Germany carve up Poland as Hitler’s admiring accomplice. At the end of the War Poland was still enslaved, not by the Germans but by the Soviet Union.
5) The answer individually is regeneration. The answer globally is the Coming of the Son of Man. It is a tired objection that some of the worst wars have been religious wars. Jesus did not exempt religious wars from His prophecy. It was religious people who killed Him. When professing Christians are guilty of aggressive warfare or wanton slaughter they are not being faithful to the New Testament. Indulge my prejudice please but I don’t think either Communist ideology or the Koran can be said to offer comparable safeguards against all which leads to war.
May peace come soon to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Sudan, and to all the earth’s habitable spaces.
And a September full of peaceful and pleasant things to you all.
Even so come quickly Lord Jesus.
Selah.

Freedom: 20 Years On

2009-08-26T09:28:00.000-07:00

The first time I visited Eastern Europe I baptized 12 Hungarians in secret at Lake Balaton at 10:30 in the evening. They were mostly students. For security purposes we arrived suddenly and departed even more suddenly. The words pronounced over the students in the water were echoed antiphonally in Hungarian on the shore by someone now a colleague in Budapest. He had (and has) a heavy South Carolina accent. I’m sure the startled loiterers on the beach remember that night even more vividly than I.
“Because of your profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord
And because you’re trusting in His death and in His shed blood alone to save you from your sins
I baptize you my brother Gabor (or my sister Anna)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
Amen.”
Last Saturday I said those same words over 9 Czech and Slovak university students in a little lake in Moravia, Czech Republic. We were right out in the open at the end of a week-long Conference also in the open. I drove over two borders to get there and was never asked to show my passport. Such are the new realities which accompany freedom in Eastern Europe.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. With it the Iron Curtain dissolved. It had stretched, in Churchill’s famous formula, “from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic...”.
What seemed like a permanent fixture in our lives was suddenly gone. The disappearance of the Soviet Bloc was not one of those gradual Roman Empire-like decays with barbarians finally at the gates. It was more like Belshazzar’s feast. In a moment it vanished. And anyway the barbarians had always been ruling from inside the gate.
Can it have been 20 years?
The Hungarians have always received too little credit. Our memory is settled on the Germans thronging each side of the wall shouting “Freiheit!, Freiheit!, Freiheit!”. I am grateful that our family was in Germany that unforgettable day.
But the thing was actually precipitated in Sopron, Hungary, at an obscure crossing into Austria. The Hungarians opened the border and let everyone through without challenge. Ernst Honecker the East German leader and Nicolai Ceausescu the Romanian ogre begged Gorbachev to send the tanks in as they did during the ’56 rising. He refused and the game was over. In a startlingly short time the Soviet Empire disappeared.
The vestiges of socialist conviction and Communist idealism are alive all over the world. In China, fast becoming the most consequential nation on the planet, the Communists still rule. It’s important to remember that political and economic theories are just that: theories.
It was the Communists themselves who always insisted we look to the verdict of History.
Agreed.
And the verdict of history is this:
No one ever died trying to escape from the West side of the Iron Curtain to the East side.
In one of the first blogs I told you about Lenka, a remarkable Czech songwriter. I’ve attached two of her songs sung after the baptism last Saturday for you to enjoy.
You won’t understand the words but I think you will agree they are beautiful.
They may even help you to worship as you reflect upon God’s providence among the nations in 1989.
Lenka became a believer soon after the events of those days.

On the Reading of Old Books

2009-08-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

Andrew A Bonar

Benjamin B. Warfield
Warren Wiersbe warned against forsaking the books of the ages for the books of the hour. We are reading books now which will not be read 50 years hence. If a book will not be read in an after-generation it is doubtful whether it should be read as a contemporary edition. The obvious problem with this thesis is that the classics were new in their own generation, and the only way to determine which books should endure is to read them. That notwithstanding, it would seem prudent to bulk our reading diet with volumes which have endured. CS Lewis (who else?) recommended that we read two old books for every new one. Sound counsel that.
It is possible of course to take our preferences for the old to an extreme. If I opposed everything new and ephemeral I would be a hypocrite to write this blog. For a very brief period Lewis and his colleague JRR Tolkien succeeded in eliminating every book published after the death of Keats from the Oxford English syllabus! Their argument (which I won’t go into) took some funny turns and (unlike most of their arguments) was easily refuted. Owen Barfield (Lewis’ best friend while an Oxford undergraduate) condemned what he called “chronological snobbery’ which meant prejudice against something because it was old. But the thing can work in reverse as well. We of an antiquarian bent run the risk of rejecting something of value simply because it is not old. Still I prefer the old, and am convinced, that “…the old is better…” (Luke 5:39)
It’s the same with music. Many years ago I was listening to Twila Paris (then a contemporary favorite). Most of her recorded songs are her own. In the middle of one CD though, I was startled by the words:
“Rise up my soul arise
Shake off thy guilty fears
The bleeding sacrifice on thy behalf appears”
Much as I admire her it was immediately obvious that she did not write the song. And not only that, I was convinced THE SONG COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IN THE 20th CENTURY.
“Before the throne thy surety stands
My name is written on His hands.”
I read the liner notes to confirm the obvious.
The thing was done by Charles Wesley.
(By the way, Twila’s updated version was terrific.)
Even CS Lewis confessed to enjoying the novels of his contemporary EM Forster. He was also a great fan of PG Wodehouse (my own favorite secular author- candy for the mind and highly addictive) who outlived Lewis by over 11 years. CSL himself was contemporary with some of us and it would be a dreary year if we couldn’t read him. Plus sometimes we have to read the new to appreciate the quality of the old. And (returning to my theme), I again insist: THE OLD IS BETTER.
Rather than simply plead let me commend. I offer two books unfamiliar to some.
The first is by AA Bonar (1810-1892) who came from a remarkable family of Scots Presbyterians. Bonar combined real scholarship (he wrote a commentary on Leviticus which is still in print) with arduous labor in pastoral ministry. His was a godliness which showed itself chiefly by a deep humility. Bonar’s most fervent aim was to please God in all he did, and his most sincere conviction was that he’d fallen woefully short of the mark. He was the friend and biographer of Robert Murray M’Cheyne who is generally regarded as Scotland’s greatest preacher, though he reached heaven before he reached 30. Iain Murray, the Founder/Editor of Banner of Truth Publishers, knows a thing or two about old books. When he was asked to list the most important book Banner had republished he named two. One was Bonar’s biography of M’Cheyne. (The other was Spurgeon’s Autobiography). But it is Bonar’s journals, published in a volume called ‘Diary and Life’, which I put forward. My wife calls it the most spiritual book she ever read, and I would agree.
Though he was a high Calvinist and thus believed everything profitable to us eternally comes solely because of God’s gracious initiation, he could still write:
“I see that we must make EFFORTS if we are to be blessed.” March 29th 1847
Prayer was his great preoccupation yet he warns, “We must not talk about prayer-we must pray in right earnest. The Lord is near. He comes softly while the virgins slumber.”
He knew that it was possible to live with privilege and yet to languish. Consider this: “Last night…nothing shamed me more than the sin of praying little when we might ask in Christ’s Name so much and receive so much. We have stood at the well all day and scarce drawn up a few drops.”
The book is laden as a feast of hearty things like “wine on the lees well refined.”
I also commend ‘Faith and Life’ by BB Warfield (1851-1921) the great Princeton theologian. If Bonar’s book is for the serious Christian then this second volume is for the serious Bible student. The two ought necessarily to go hand in hand should they not? But I fear in practice it is not always so. The book is a record of Warfield’s addresses to his students at Princeton Seminary during informal gatherings on Sunday afternoons. In written form the addresses appear as essays on varied texts linked by a common profundity but otherwise unconnected. For breathtaking insights on verses we thought were familiar the book stands alone in my experience.
When I read the chapter called ‘Light and Shining’ I wondered if I’d ever even remembered anything I’d learned in Bible study. That essay examines the reasons Jesus taught in parables. While reading I realized that still by my mid-fifties the true explanation had eluded me. Most of the teaching is quite accessible e.g. why did the Lord commend child-likeness? Not, Warfield argues, because innocence is the thing desired but rather it is the qualities of dependence and trust which advance us toward the Kingdom. Other lessons are not as easily appropriated and the reader is required to yield something like seminary study itself to benefit from all Warfield offers.
“Not,” he writes, “as if knowledge were the end --life, undoubtedly, is the end at which the saving processes are directed….”
Insights like those served up by Bonar and Warfield are seldom encountered in contemporary writing or preaching.
But because such treasure is still available we must avail.
By availing we may help to mend the age.

Calvin at the Half-Millennium

2009-07-10T08:24:00.001-07:00

John Calvin (1509-1564)

About the time I became a Christian one of the first teachers I heard warned, "Never form an opinion of anyone based on data supplied by their enemies." In context he was speaking of the Puritans. It’s especially important to heed that warning in the case of John Calvin (whom the Puritans revered) who was born July 10, 1509 in Noyon, France. I remembered that when I read William Manchester's book 'A World Lit Only By Fire.' I admire Manchester’s work as a historian. As a theologian he is not to be recommended. Doubtless his theology improved just after his death a few years ago. Manchester ripped Calvin unmercifully and, I would guess, inaccurately. Calvin is one of the most vilified figures in Western history.
He is also one of the greatest.
He is to theology what Shakespeare is to literature.
Sadly Calvin is mistrusted and even reviled by large numbers of Evangelical Christians. For these and other reasons it is important to read Calvin himself. It’s even more important for those inclined to oppose him.
Full disclosure demands that I confess I have not read all of Calvin's Magnum Opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion, but what I have read is thrilling. Calvin maintains a variety, pace and intensity unparalleled in theological writing. Calvin speaks of what he calls "the exuberant goodness of God," and he himself writes with an exuberance which never flags. Other apologists cede much to unbelievers in seeking common ground for dialog and witness. Calvin conceded nothing. Every paragraph Calvin wrote burns with the conviction that the God of Israel is immaculate, matchless in His perfection, and unassailable in His judgments, while the sinner has nothing to commend himself in the face of God's holiness. For the sinner then the only hope can be a grace never merited, never deserved. Calvin was THE apologist of the Protestant Reformation par excellence. As a proclaimer, defender and expositor of God's sovereignty and majesty he has no peers.
In the Fourth and Thirteenth Centuries God gave the Church Augustine and Aquinas. That he would give Luther and Calvin in the same generation is proof of the grace which marked the era of the Reformation.
The greatest quote I know is from Calvin. I only learned it from a secondary source and if anyone can help in locating the original I'd be grateful. Nicholas Woltersdorf the distinguished Yale philosopher shared the quote in the volume "Philosophers Who Believe." Quoting Calvin he wrote:
"To be human is to be that point in the cosmos which responds to the goodness of God with gratitude."
One reason that insight rocks me is that it is so difficult to define what it is to be human. The Marxists claim the key is economic, the fascists racial, the Freudians psycho-sexual, and the Darwinians biological, but none of these keys fit the lock. The Bible teaches that Man (by which we mean man as male and female) is a steward, a fallen image-bearer who can be rescued only by a Wounded Healer. That Man is fallen accounts for the horrors even Christians are capable of. That Man is an image-bearer accounts for the nobility detectable in all, even those who don’t believe.
And here is Calvin nailing it. We are created for God's glory. To give Him glory we must find Him good. If we find Him good we must give Him thanks.
And the definition is not a mere abstraction. Prof. Woltersdorf was gripped by what Calvin wrote during the season of his own son's death at 25. When I read his essay he seemed to ask the question: "My son is dead. Is God still good? And am I still grateful?"
Whether we FEEL it to be so or not, the answer to the first question is always “Yes.”. God grant that we would always be able to give a “yes” answer to the second question as well even if sorely tested.
As much as any Christian who ever wrote Calvin helps move us toward the right answer.

Israel - Again

2009-06-26T11:45:00.001-07:00

Two of the more thoughtful Christians I know wrote short enigmatic responses to the entry of June 23rd.
I’m not sure what they meant exactly (perhaps we’ll talk soon) but I can guess.
One has spent his adult life as a Missionary to the Turkish people. The other is ethnic Lebanese (fully American in every sense) and Christian.
By emphasizing Israel I want to avoid understandable but erroneous inferences. There are two camps which define opposite perspectives on Israel among American evangelicals. One is the Replacement Camp. This view insists that the promises to Israel have been forfeited due to the national rejection of the Messiah. Those promises (amounting to prophecies in the Old Testament) which have to do with future Kingdom benefits to the Jews are spiritualized and rolled over to the Church. The promises to Israel are therefore rendered symbolic. This is in fact the majority view of Christian scholars since the Reformation. Recently I read a powerful exposition of this point of view by Herman Bavink the great Dutch theologian who died in 1921. Most who hold this position would deem it a grave error to posit any correlation at all between any current or future resurrection of national Israel and biblical prophecy. Dazzled as I am by many who hold this view I can’t get there. There are lots of reasons. I will mention only two.
After forty days of post-Resurrection instruction the Apostles had one last pre-Ascension question for the Lord. We may assume that many topics were addressed during those forty days. The Holy Spirit inspiring Luke the historian reveals only one. They were taught about the Kingdom of God. And that’s what the last question was about. The disciples wanted to know when the Lord was going to restore the Kingdom TO ISRAEL. The question (after being catechized for forty days) was not about replacement but restoration. Now if the view just outlined were the correct one I would have expected the Lord to say “Don’t you guys ever pay attention? There’s not going to be any restoration to Israel.” But He doesn’t say that at all. What He does say in effect is”The timing is not important for you to know.” (Acts 1:6-7). Also, if we spiritualize the promises to Israel and assign those promises to the Church, huge tracts of Holy Scripture are rendered unintelligible. This is true not only in the Old Testament but in the New Testament as well. Where are the correspondences to the 144,000 in the Church? On what conceivable basis could the Tribes mentioned in Revelation 7 and 14 be identified within the Church?
I would describe the other camp as Israel Boosters. It’s not a designation I wholly disdain for myself because I believe we can see good arguments not only for Israel’s right to exist but for Israel’s right to certain disputed territorial claims POLITICALLY. If we restrict ourselves to political arguments then I think Israel can make a very strong case indeed.
The problem is that the favor Israel enjoys among American evangelicals is not based exclusively or even primarily upon political arguments. The favor is tied to the notion that the Jews are God’s chosen people and we must favor Israel for that reason. Because I do expect a future for (a fully converted and Christian) Israel it would be easy to assume that I am planted firmly in this camp. But it is not so. It is a great mistake to rubber stamp with approval any policy adopted by an Israeli government. Let me reiterate that if we argue politically Israel may make strong cases. But if we approach the question from the biblical point of view alone (which as Christians we must do) then I draw the conclusion that Israel ought to give the land up. I know this seems inconsistent with a Premillennial perspective (the perspective I embrace). I would argue that it is not inconsistent at all, though it is certainly not in line with the way most premillennialists approach the question.
Israel is a socialist state dominated by secularists who have no theistic convictions at all. Those who do have religious convictions are mostly Orthodox Jews who believe that Jesus of Nazareth was an imposter. It is a grave error to think that God favors in any way whatsoever an Israel so disposed toward His Son. In writing this I realize that Romans 3:1ff must be carefully and faithfully interpreted because it can be construed so as to offer a refutation to what I have just written.
“Then what advantage has the Jew…
Great in every way…”
But instead of taking the space to try and explain Romans 3 in context I will simply offer the following: Those Israelis who reject Christ want the Kingdom without the King. It cannot and ought not to be. I believe the critical parable of Matthew’s Gospel is the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen in Matthew 21. Let us be careful here. We must steer clear of any temptation to blame the Jews for the death of the Lord any more than we blame ourselves. I live in a part of the world where the history of anti-Semitism is shameful to a hellish degree. And the poison is not dormant. Often I plead with my Eastern European friends that however much they may be attracted to a political platform if that platform gives in to anti-Semitism in the slightest the thing must be condemned and resisted. That said, the Zionist Jews who spurn Jesus are in the precise position of the tenants in the parable (Matthew 21:33-46). You can’t have the Kingdom without the King. That’s why it’s a real Kingdom. There lives a real King. His Name is Jesus. The promises are only valid in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20).
On June 23rd my emphasis on Israel was purely to make the point that hope in the Lord’s soon coming has been based on real events in every generation. Before 1948 AD (the year Israel was reconstituted as a political entity) Christians found reasons to hope upon grounds which may have had little or nothing to do with Israel. But hope they did. My two correspondents because of who they are and what they do are vitally concerned with the evangelization of currently Islamized peoples. Any positive regard of Israel among those peoples is bound to offend and alienate. But we mustn’t abandon truth to placate unbelief. No lost people whether Jews or Muslims should dictate Gospel emphases. Our responsibility is to declare the whole counsel of God including Israel’s past favor, current condemnation, and future restoration. As for modern, not-yet-Christian Israel the dry bones are not yet alive. But they have been reassembled, are upright and walking. God grant that one day this walking skeleton may receive a heart of flesh. Meanwhile let us love, regard and highly esteem Arab believers, Christian believers in non-Arab Muslim countries and especially the Palestinian Christians who must surely feel like the loneliest and most forgotten Christians in the world at times.
It is certain that no Christian group or individual has flawlessly projected the coming prophetic scenario. After all John the Baptist (distracted by his own suffering) voiced doubts even about the First Coming (see Matthew 11) and he was the Forerunner of that Coming. It is folly not to allow for our own fallibility in this regard. We can be humble and irenic without retreating to a waffling tentativeness. The brunt of our apologetics ought always to rest on prophecy already fulfilled not that broad span of prophetic truth which awaits future fulfillment.
We believers may disagree on the particulars of prophecy but we are united around the larger reality.
This same Jesus, crucified, buried, risen and ascended will come again!
Personally, universally, finally, and undeniably He will return in the same body which hung upon the cross.
WHETHER IT WILL BE IN OUR GENERATION OR NOT WE DON’T KNOW.
But we can ask.
Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus

The Power of Pop Culture (part 2)

2009-06-26T06:17:00.001-07:00

This morning in Budapest we awoke to look out upon a world without Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. They have joined what Woody Allen called “The Great Majority.” Like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson they died on the same day. And in America they are at least as well known as our second and third Presidents. Whether it will be so a hundred years hence I like to think not. The receptionist at my Hungarian doctor’s office asked me if I had heard Michael Jackson died. She looked stricken and on the verge of tears. She is about 75 years old. Such is the reach of American Popular Culture.
Michael Jackson came to Moscow while we lived there. Katie was a ninth grader in a secular German school. It seemed the end of the world for her not to go to that concert, not only because everyone else was going, but because Michael Jackson was, she informed me, “the best dancer in the world.” In Moscow it was an Event. For a 14 year old exiled from Munich to live in Moscow it was Everything. I had a bad feeling. It wasn’t just the revulsion of a Christian father over exposure to Michael Jackson. It was the concern of any father about what could happen in a crowd that size on a Moscow night. Moscow was a bit like the Wild West in those days. I could have handed down a decree from on high, but I didn’t. I negotiated. Finally she relented. I don’t remember what her compensation was, but it must have been stupendous. She may still think I owe her one. Maybe I do.
Did we ever hear the word "iconic” 20 years ago? I think rarely. Today the term is ubiquitous. First I read of the iconic television show Charlie’s Angels. I never saw the show. That may be the only boast I can make about a misspent youth. Then I read of Farrah’s iconic hair and her iconic 1976 poster. This morning I am told of Michael’s iconic 1993 Thriller Tour. That must have been the one which came to Moscow. To think that in Russia of all places I could have deprived my daughter of an iconic experience is ironic if I may be allowed to use a word that rhymes.
To my low Protestant understanding an icon is a thing invested with a kind of regard which ought only to be reserved for Deity. Not that I worry that it’s as bad as all that in most cases. It is certain though that the pain suffered by masses of secular people at the loss of celebrities would be substantially mitigated if a fit object for worship could be found. Are there many feeling that loss at this moment who would be pleased if a son or daughter made the choices Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett made? And speaking of sons and daughters Farrah’s son was in prison the day his mother died. They last met on a restricted prison visit in April. Now THAT’S sad.
And is it possible that Ed McMahon could have died the very same week? He and Johnny Carson (on the iconic Tonight Show remember?) used to play out a running gag where Carson pretended to be an old woman. One of the recurring jokes was that the woman would not allow any reference to death. Such references are always uncomfortable and seldom allowed in secular discourse. That we all die is a great embarrassment to non-transcendent philosophies which refuse to reckon with death.
But we all die anyway.
Even the rich and the famous.
Even the iconic.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Thus passes the glory of the world.

Plausibility and Unbelief

2009-06-23T03:23:00.000-07:00

Bart Ehrman, the Moody and Wheaton grad turned apostate, delights in explaining the "reasons" why biblical Christianity cannot be true. Not long ago I heard him being interviewed on NPR's 'Fresh Air.' Ironic title that. As he spoke the atmosphere grew noticeably stale.
One of his arguments majored on the number of Christians in every generation who believed the Lord would come in their lifetime. Inside Prof. Ehrman’s formidable brain this constitutes a kind of “proof” which delegitimizes faith. For some reason the same phenomenon inclines me toward the opposite conclusion.
Is it not striking that the center and burden of prophecies separated from us by a distance measured in millennia should remain so frightfully current? That there could be multi-generational scenarios which plausibly fuel biblical hope is itself a kind of verification of Christianity’s truth claims. In the last few days three issues dominate the news-cycle:
1) The Israeli Prime Minister has conceded the possibility of a Palestinian State.
2) The validity of the reelection of a particularly rabid anti-Jewish savage in Iran is being disputed.
3) Al-Qaeda and the Taliban continue their grisly work of theologically inspired murder, including aid workers (women and children among them) in Yemen none of whom were American.
Does anybody still remember why these stupefying fiends began to hate us in the first place? It was because of an American presence on the Arabian peninsula. And it was because of an American sympathy for Israel.
Why do the heathen rage, and the peoples imagine a vain thing?
What are the chances that the relevance of prophecies about Israel would survive the passage of time when Israel itself did not survive between 70 and 1948 AD? It would be an odd coincidence that current geo-political realities could be construed by ingenious exaggeration to adhere so closely to ancient prophetic forecasts.
Yet they do.
Israel matters.
Jerusalem matters, not just to the Jews and not just to those who live nearby.
There are two kinds of hearts. One believes the witness and opens itself up to what God is saying and showing in all ages. Such hearts incline toward a reverent but (hopefully) also sober and even scholarly calibration of what God proclaims in Scripture and what God performs in history.
By human reckoning two thousand years is a long time to wait for Jesus to come back. Just so two thousand years is also a long time to sustain any resemblance between the world of 2009 and the world now buried in the abyss of time where the original prophecies were uttered. In fact we are warned not to measure this particular expectation in terms of human notions of time. With the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day...
The Lord is not slow about His promise as some count slowness...
Forty days was too long for some to wait on Moses to return from the Mountain. There were skeptics then though they'd been favored with the spectacle of miracles. There are skeptics now though some, like Professor Ehrman, have been favored with study at places like Moody and Wheaton.
The cleavage between the believing and the skeptical constitutes a divide more profound than that between the genders or the races.
One group will see the sky opened.
In Moses' generation the other group saw the opening of the ground.

A Phenomenon at Sunset

2009-05-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

Every three years Inter-Varsity holds a meeting on the campus of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. The goal is to encourage students to give themselves to Great Commission enterprises. I urged a group of new Christians to attend Urbana ‘76 with confidence they would be bowled over by at least one of the two great speakers featured that year. When they returned they could only rave about Helen Roseveare. I was mystified. I’d never heard of HR. Of course I asked for tapes. After listening I became a serious fan.

In 1983 the Ben Lippen Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, hosted Helen Roseveare at one of their Summer Conferences. Sadly Ben Lippen Conference is no more. It was operated by Columbia Bible College which is now called Columbia International University. In Britain Inter-Varsity has changed its name to Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. This year the meeting will be in St. Louis not Urbana. The trend toward name-changes among Churches and Christian Institutions is rampant. My own Mission, ‘Entrust’, used to be called BEE (Biblical Education by Extension) International. It’s a trend with which I sympathize having been sorely tempted to change my own name on numerous occasions. I don’t even have the option of retreating to the more serious “Ronald” as “Ronnie“ is the name on my birth certificate. Those of us born in the American South are often saddled with the names of young children which must be borne through adulthood. Just ask Billy Graham. In one Church I was informed that I would have to abandon “Ronnie” because it didn’t fit the sophisticated international city where I’d just landed. Initially I leaped at this opportunity. The prospect of having a name consonant with a nature as romantic and intellectual as my own (so obvious to all who know me) as well as a name worthy of that great city excited me immensely. Sadly I had to give it up in the end. However much I admitted the need, and however much I wanted to go through life being called “Sebastian Paradise” or “Crispin St. Cyr” (those were the two finalists- I decided that if I was going to change my first name I should go ahead and change my surname as well) I couldn’t imagine that it would go down well on my visits back to Norcross, Georgia. Where I grew up we usually leave these prerogatives to the mom and dad. Inter-Varsity and Columbia Bible College were held back by none of the considerations which inhibited me and I wish them well.

But I digress.

After hearing Helen Roseveare speak six times on Jonah I concluded that she was the best speaker I’d ever heard. I knew it grated whenever I expressed that opinion. Comparisons, as Will Shakespeare noted, are odious. Plus she’s a woman. When I gave the Jonah tapes to a Marine Sergeant in our North Carolina Church he protested “Why are you giving me tapes by a woman?” I simply asked him to fasten his seat belt and pay attention. The next day he called and said “You told me about the seat belt; why didn’t you tell me about the crash helmet?” That Marine (who’d not attended college at the time) now holds a PhD and is on the Faculty at a Christian College. I like to think Helen Roseveare inspired him on his way.

It’s probably not wise to say that Helen Roseveare is the best speaker I’ve ever heard because of the way the opinion provokes controversy and comparisons. Better to say she moves me more than anyone I’ve ever heard. The question is “why?” Three things stand out:

First: Great gifts. This is pretty much a commonplace. We would expect great gifts from those invited to speak at Urbana. We run into great gifts fairly often though we’d like to encounter them even more. She is a gifted thinker. She is a gifted theological processor and, supremely, she is a gifted speaker. Her sense of dramatic moment, intonation and emphasis are perfectly calibrated and combine for maximum effect.

Second: Great commitment. Her intellectual gifts earned her an MD from Cambridge University. Women had to be overqualified to be considered for Medical School in the 40’s. But it was her great commitment which brought her into the great danger where she made her impact. Instead of settling down into the middle class routine which physicians could expect in Post-War socialist Britain she set out for Africa. From 1953 to 1973 she practiced Medical Missions in the Belgian Congo which was later called Zaire which is now called Congo .(Our name change motif persists). She built a clinic in a place called Nebabongo where she embraced obscurity, danger and difficulty as a way of life.

The third great element is suffering. Great gifts plus great commitment plus great suffering. The first two we may frequently witness but how seldom the three in combination. We are all dealt a measure of suffering, but for her it has been GREAT suffering. Helen Roseveare was kidnaped and tortured by rebel soldiers in the mid-sixties and during the five months of her captivity was subjected to ordeals worse than death.

In that crucible was forged a witness to Christ’s sufficiency in the cruelest of situations. She faced her agony with this prayer, repeated like a refrain in a hymn of praise:
“Lord, I thank You for trusting me with this experience, even though You haven’t chosen to tell me the reason why.”

Two years ago I told some fellow-missionaries that HR was the best. It never occurred to me that we should invite HR to our next Conference for the same reason it never occurred to me to invite the Beatles to my birthday party. I thought it would be overreaching. I knew it would be futile. But two of my colleagues did invite her and she accepted. And so we heard her in Sopron Hungary on April 22-26. When she was invited neither she nor we knew that Sopron would be her last speaking engagement. It’s a decision we pray God overrules but the reality invested our time with a solemnity and sense of occasion we’d not anticipated. We heard Helen Roseveare in the sunset of what has been a remarkable career of faithfulness to the King of Kings.

I thank God for Helen Roseveare. And I thank God that the state of media technology in the 20th and 21rst Centuries make it possible to hear her voice after retirement.

I wish I could have heard the voices of Edwards and Whitefield and Spurgeon.

But the voice of Helen will suffice.

Passing It On

2009-05-12T01:14:00.000-07:00

Skip and Barbara Ryan were the featured speakers at the first annual Danube International Church Retreat in Cserkeszőlő, Hungary April 17-19. Skip is the Chancellor of Redeemer Theological Seminary in Dallas.

His messages connected here. We don’t want to hoard the insights in our part of the world. They need to be circulated. Here are some thoughts which appealed to me especially:

Fear is a refusal to live in the present.
It costs us much to lose everything but when we lose everything we begin to live.
While you’re lying to God you can’t experience His love.
Adversity introduces me to myself.
Every addiction leads to stealth. And stealth makes betrayal inevitable.
It is the love of Christ which breaks us.
Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die (I’d heard this said of blame).
Humility was not considered a virtue in the ancient world. For Paul to elaborate upon Christ’s great humility in emptying himself and refusing to cling to the prerogatives of Deity (Phil. 2:4-11) was counter-cultural to a considerable degree.
Manual labor was not considered an acceptable occupation for a man of consequence. For Paul to publicize that he made tents was equally counter-cultural.
What somebody else thinks of me is none of my business.

Personally I find the first and last insights to be the most provocative. I find the last to be especially liberating. It’s one thing to be reminded (as we often have been) that we oughtn’t to worry about what other people think. It delivers a fresh jolt to be told that what others think is actually none of our business!

One confirmation of Christian truth comes when we meet people of widely divergent backgrounds who share the same experience of having the core of their personality and history dissected and defined by what Scripture reveals .That happens when we compare notes with our other believers. Further confirmation comes when we see a commonality of experience with those figures we encounter in Holy Scripture. It is certainly possible to gain marvelous insights about human personality when we read other ancient literature like the Odyssey or the Aeneid. But the Bible takes us to another level. Those other ancient writings do not unmask and convict us. Nor do we find in them the power to effect personal transformation.

The proper word a (bit overused in recent years) is resonance. Much of our shared experience would remain static, discrete, random and ultimately lost if not clarified by the infinite reference point which is the Word of God mediated by the Spirit of God. Skip led us in those kind of shared discoveries and affirmations. For that we are grateful.

And from that we share.

The Power of Pop Culture

2009-05-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night Beyoncé performed at the Sport Palace in Budapest. Earlier that day I boarded a train for the Czech Republic. In my early youth I would have cursed my fate. At age 58 I simply view it as good timing. I’m not familiar with Beyoncé’s music, but I did catch her in the first Pink Panther movie which starred Steve Martin. Probably Beyoncé is not familiar with Exodus 3. If she were she would not have called her spring travels the “I Am Tour”. At least I hope she wouldn’t. Seems I remember that in 2008 Beyoncé and her husband earned only slightly less than the gross domestic product of Paraguay. Such is the power of Pop.

Speaking of the new Inspector Clouseau, a Christian leader who never comments on my sermons rushed forward to congratulate me for quoting Steve Martin in my opening remarks a few Sundays ago. (A banjo was featured in our worship that morning.) That kind of thing happens quite often. People are more likely to talk about something not related to the exposition of Scripture. A wonderfully effective women’s teacher once confided to me that nearly 100% of the women who wanted to speak with her after she taught were seeking counsel on personal and family problems. They almost never registered interest in implications and applications from the text. Of course, if we hope to help anyone with their problems we’d better be ready with implications and applications from the text. It’s always amazed me that if I mention a film or a line from a song it almost never fails to elicit comment.

Popular culture is a force to be reckoned with. It is often a negative thing. It can be a neutral thing. It is seldom a positive thing, though its lessons can be shaped for edifying purposes by thoughtful believers. I realize that I too am influenced by popular culture, but I hope not as much as I used to be. I have no desire to listen to Beyoncé, but I’m glad I saw the Beatles live when I was 14. When I was a university student I had not one but two posters of Bob Dylan on my wall. Almost any jingle-jangle morning I would have followed him. Then one day I realized he wasn't kidding when he sang "...there is no place I'm going to” (Mr. Tambourine Man). Whether the change came about because I became a Christian or because I was growing up, I don’t know; maybe it was a bit of both.

As far as ministry in the 21st century goes we may take more than one approach to popular culture. Some churches gauge the direction of the cultural wind and begin to pedal hard in that direction. We may congratulate them for their alertness. But there’s a difference between heeding and leading. Those churches are much more likely to show a clip from a film than they are to quote from someone like Augustine or Calvin. Another approach is to always learn from culture but never give in to it. It is prudent and it is sometimes necessary to note cultural markers which a majority of the congregation are thinking about. Then, having duly noted those cultural influences which affect our thinking, we give ourselves to the hard task of bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

I vote for option two.

Between Sunday and Friday

2009-04-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

Someone (if you know who tell me) said that civilization is a thin veneer stretched across an ocean of barbarism.
Is it just me or is the fabric of civilization fraying?
Seven maniacs have gunned down over 50 Americans in the last 30 days. And that’s only the mass shootings. A few hours ago pirates captured an American vessel which has at this moment been retaken by its crew.
It’s almost Easter.
In years past I asked my Congregation the same question on Palm Sunday. Did Israel go from civilization to barbarism in the space of five days? How could the same crowd which hailed the Lord in adulation on Sunday demand His execution on Friday? The question is complex, but I now believe it was misconstrued. Complex because we can’t be sure how many of the same people who shouted “Hosanna” on Sunday shouted “Give us Barabbas” on Friday.
The Chief Priests allied with the Pharisees would have been perfectly capable of producing a rent-a-crowd at a moment’s notice on the Friday morning. But the mood on the street could actually have turned against Jesus as well.
I believe the question was misconstrued because I’m no longer sure the crowd did change. The word Hosanna means’ Lord Save!’ The tragedy is that most who shouted the word weren’t pleading for the salvation Jesus of Nazareth came to offer. They didn’t mean “Deliver us from the dread power sin has over us, because we have transgressed against the God of Israel and cannot save ourselves.” It was rather “Throw the Romans out. Remove the heel of Rome from the neck of Israel.” It was a political and military deliverance they were after. In short they craved the solution Barabbas was offering.
On Palm Sunday with Jerusalem at a fever pitch the Greeks asked for a word with Jesus. At the critical moment there came a word from Jesus: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it abides alone. But if it dies it bears much fruit.” We are prone to abstract those words from their context and preserve them in memory as a kind of general spiritual principle. But in context Jesus was speaking about Himself. He came not to kill the enemies of Israel but to die for them. That wasn’t quite what the crowd had in mind
Jesus’ plan of salvation must be paramount. It supplants all salvation strategies of our own devising. The Gospel stands alone. By its very nature it can never be one choice among many.
Timothy Keller has observed that the Lord Jesus left us with a choice most stark: “Crown Me or kill Me.”
The Friday mob made its choice.
We must make ours as well.
The Cross is still our only hope 2000 years after The Event.
To embrace the message of the Cross is to make God our Father and Heaven our home.
Anything less means the Abyss.

Marriage in the Second Half

2009-03-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

Jane and I were married in West Point , Virginia 32 years ago today. It’s conceivable that I will be alive at age 91. If I actually survive until then (along with my bride) then we’ve not yet entered the second half. But it’s a safe bet we’re more than half done already. Some of our wedding guests expected to tour the Military Academy . Whether any were serious or not I couldn’t tell . There’s that other West Point in New York where Lee and Macarthur studied. There were some present then not with us now. Most sorely missed are our two dads. We flew to London for the honeymoon. First because my father offered to pay and, secondly, because we thought we would never have the chance to cross the ocean again on a minister’s salary. A baggage handler’s strike at Heathrow compounded the trans-Atlantic exhaustion. Our driver couldn’t find the hotel. It snowed the day we arrived as it snowed in Budapest this morning. I had no coat.
Southerners eventually learn.
I wish everyone I know were as blessed in marriage as I. I want to talk about it more often but am always afraid 1) It will sound like boasting 2) It will make those formerly married or unhappily married uncomfortable. My happiness in marriage is due to Jesus and Jane --in that order,
Jesus launched His ministry of miraculous signs at a wedding. After His baptism He stood where Adam fell by resisting the devil in the wilderness. Adam and Eve did not eat the fruit because they were hungry. They were not hungry. They could eat from any tree in the Garden save one. They ate the fruit because they believed a lie about God. Adam sinned on a full stomach. The Second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ refused to turn stones into bread even though He was starving. When we track the chronology of the Gospels we see that Jesus was baptized in Matthew 3, tempted in Matthew 4, walked back to the scene of His baptism in John 1 then walked toward Cana into John 2.So He traveled from the wilderness to the wedding In the wilderness He refused Himself bread though He was starving. At the wedding He gave others wine though they had drunk. Bread is a necessity. Wine is a luxury. He granted luxury to others while denying necessity to Himself Surely this is the model for every husband. Surely Jesus is the perfect Bridegroom (John 3:29) .After He rehabilitated the moral possibilities for Man by succeeding where Adam failed He set out on a rescue mission for marriage. When Adam and Eve sinned marriage fell with the rest of Creation. There was shame and there was blame. Shame and blame would have been imminent in Cana once the wine was gone.
The wine can run out in any marriage if we are left to our own resources. That’s a place God never intended to leave us. Jesus was invited to Cana . And when He is invited into marriage He makes Himself available to meet every legitimate need. Sometimes we ask and He appears to delay. When Mary declared they’d run out of wine I can only trace a “no” in His response. Somehow Mary heard a “yes”. At that moment she gives the servants the greatest counsel ever uttered in the history of the world. “Do everything He tells you” she says.Could there be any greater counsel than that?
Ours is to apply, obey and wait, even when the wait is agonizingly long (though those first century guests didn’t wait long). His part is to bless and provide.
Jane and I have reaped the benefits of His unfailing presence and undeserved blessing for a very short 32 years.
The headwaiter marveled that the best wine was saved for last.
That’s a precedent for joy in the second half.

Atheism and One Frail Presumption

2009-03-25T07:29:00.000-07:00

I find it possible to sympathize with the agnostic (though not with agnosticism). How can you argue with a man who says he doesn’t know? You can only agree and ask for the privilege of helping. One beggar telling another where he has found bread. Of course there are two kinds of agnostics. There is the tentative agnosticism of indecision which confesses merely “I don’t know.” Then there is the dogmatic agnosticism of arrogance which declares that the fact of God’s existence cannot be known. The second is, of course, but atheism thinly disguised. And for atheism we have no sympathy. The atheist we may regard. But to his views we offer no quarter. Let us consider one of the bedrock arguments which issues from that school.
The most obvious problem with atheism is that it accounts for nothing. How intellectually engaged people can be attracted to a system which can account for nothing at all escapes me, but there it is. Sartre, himself an atheist, had the courage to admit that the greatest philosophical problem is why there is something rather than nothing. You bet that’s a problem for atheism .And how. And an insoluble one at that. But the objection is deftly countered by proponents of the New Atheism Chic. Led by the likes of Professor Dawkins they respond:
“Of course we cannot account for the existence of the material universe. But neither can theists account for the existence of God. So the problems are equivalent. We are stymied then, and the score is a tie.”
But the score is not tied. The two “problems” -as a moment’s reflection will demonstrate - are manifestly not equivalent.
It was Aristotle (no evangelical he) who insisted that mind was much more likely to produce non-mind (or lesser minds) than non-mind was likely to produce mind. And Aristotle was absolutely right.
Dawkins’ difficulty (which he freely admits) is that he is not able to conceptualize God. He simply cannot imagine an uncreated Creator. And he begs that we not believe in God for that very reason viz. that he, Professor Dawkins, cannot imagine God. Forgive me if I don’t find that a compelling reason for unbelief.
Is it necessary for lesser creatures to comprehend the superior qualities in a higher creature (in this case the Creator) for those qualities to be validated? A dog may not be able to comprehend a good deal about a man: e.g. how a man can ride a bicycle, play a piano or read a newspaper? Is it rational to argue that the incomprehensibility of those capacities at a lower level of creation in any way vitiates their reality? That would be foolish in the extreme would it not? But it is exactly that kind of foolishness which Professor Dawkins asks us to base our convictions about ultimate questions upon.
To illustrate let us return to Aristotle’s principle.
The atheist asks us to believe that by a kind of spontaneous auto-generation the inanimate components of the universe appeared (this is so obviously far-fetched that the atheist sometimes pleads the eternal existence of matter- a proposition itself just as unlikely).These inanimate components SOMEHOW randomly combine to produce –Voila! - entities infinitely complex: quasars and neurons and ganglia and peacocks and other phenomena wondrous to behold. And we are asked to believe that such a thing is ACTUALLY MORE LIKELY than the alternative that a supernatural Creator is at the back of everything. Now let us break the argument down analogically and test its plausibility.
Consider for a moment Michelangelo and the ‘David’, the sculptor and his sculpture. There are certain inanimate components in the art. There is stone and color. There are certain animate components in the artist. There is brain and blood. Which is more likely, that the components in the art produced the artist or that the components in the artist produced the art? If you protest that the analogy is not proximate I maintain that this is PRECISELY the argument the atheist proffers.
And the argument is arrant nonsense.
The problems are not equivalent.
The score is not tied.
There is intelligence in the universe because there is a Mind behind it all.
There are extant components of personality because a personal God created what is there.
Love suffuses our being because love was the motive for Creation.
A marvelous patient love which is willing to endure even the most contemptible assaults on the reality of the Lover.
But we are told that even divine endurance has limits.

Little Things that Happen

2009-03-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

Patrick O’Brien
1914-2000
It snowed in the ancient Hungarian capital today. No accumulation-- just a warning against the premature assumption of Spring.
We had another death in our wider Missionary Community last Saturday, Someone I first met in Romania during the days of Ceausescu, someone whose wedding I performed in 1989, someone agonizingly young. Partially to put off something painful, partially because I wrote about death in the last blog, I will postpone the eulogy until later. Today as a kind of defense mechanism, apropos of nothing in particular, I retreat to the trivial.
A few years ago I was reading the auto-biographical note by Philip Ryken on the Tenth Presbyterian Church Philadelphia website. James Montgomery Boice was secure enough to have a Pastor of Preaching on his staff at Tenth Pres, and he landed a great one when he recruited Philip Ryken while he was finishing up graduate work at Oxford. When Jim Boice died in 2000 he was succeeded by PR, one of the best preachers in America. In the bio Dr. Ryken registers extravagant interest in the historical novels of Patrick O’Brien—an author I’d never heard of though I learned later that the film ‘Master and Commander’ was made from one of his books. I was intrigued by the enthusiastic endorsement but not enough to do anything about it. Sometime later I discovered that a colleague in Budapest who reads and cares about the life of the mind was just as enthusiastic about the novels as Philip Ryken. I was again intrigued but, again, not enough to be goaded into action.
On February 1rst I arrived at the Budapest airport to board a flight to Moscow. The departure lounge at my gate was full so I took a seat in a deserted area next to another gate where all the passengers had just boarded. Prominent among the empty seats was a derelict volume, perhaps intentionally discarded, more likely accidentally forgotten. The flight was gone. The owner was likely gaining altitude already. But I waited a decent interval anyway before I touched the book. I wanted to satisfy my own ethical standards (regretfully never as high as, say, the Apostle Paul’s) before I exercised the old Finders Keepers prerogative - an option found nowhere in Holy Scripture. I tried not to view the acquisition as appropriating something which did not belong to me but more as providing a good home for an orphan. Oh yes, I almost forgot. I really ought to tell you the title:
Maritius Command by Patrick O’Brien the fourth of the twenty books in the Aubrey/Maturin series.
The Times of London calls O’Brien the greatest historical novelist of all time. Lavish praise that.
I’ve taken the hint.
And I’ve begun the book.
I feel guided by an unmistakable Providence.
I regard free books as a kind of sign.
Though we live in a decaying post-literary age--
Maybe I will become hopeful yet.

The Great Thing and The Greater

2009-03-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor signs off The Writer’s Almanac by saying : “Be well, do good work, and stay in touch.” I’ve not been well. I’ve done hardly any work. And I’ve not been in touch. We were in the US for Missions Conferences Feb. 10- March 5. When I boarded the plane to return I was ill. I am still ill, and only now ready to write something.
Our itinerary on the ground didn’t go as planned. Neither Virginia nor Texas was on the schedule but I flew to Dallas and Jane joined me in the drive to Virginia. The visits were necessary because someone died. The visits were unscheduled because the deaths were unforeseen.
Rachel was a friend who entered eternity at age twenty-four. She was tall, lovely, athletic and a believer. While studying in Vienna she visited us in Budapest . Deaths like hers make people ask “Why?” while others caution: “Don’t ask why.” I don’t ask the question. Neither do I caution. Neither can I answer the question though I sometimes try. Christians don’t often know “why”; they always know “Who.” Rachel’s grandmother is named Ruth. I once told Rachel her grandmother was the greatest Christian I’d ever known. I believed that because of Ruth’s stewardship of suffering. I imagine that earlier suffering is slight compared to losing Rachel. We drove to Virginia to hug Ruth’s neck and tell her how much we love her. We found her clinging to the God of Israel, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Her faith is deeper than her powers of articulation, deeper than death. Such is our God; such are His servants.
A few days after Rachel went home my Professor in Dallas died. He too visited us in Budapest. Harold Hoehner was a Cambridge PhD who published the definitive work on Ephesians in his generation. No seventy-four year old needs a great reason to die. But there was no warning. He came in from a run. Exhale on earth, inhale in heaven as one of his eulogists said. Three of my Professor’s four children have been missionaries to Russia and the fourth walks with God. I envy him that more than the Cambridge doctorate (though his college was King’s!) or the Ephesians commentary.
While he lay dying Henry James said “So the great thing comes.” They were reputed to have been his last words. Death is a great thing: inevitable, inexorable, and unrelenting. But there is a greater thing. That’s why we become missionaries, to tell the world about that greater thing. For those who die without Gospel Hope death is a permanent tragedy. The Cross has rendered death a temporary inconvenience. Savage but temporary.
I like to think my friends Harold Hoehner and Rachel Menkel have met by now in a land that is fairer than day.
Met among the shining ones.
Met before the Throne.
I know that I too will meet them there one day.
I guarantee you I will.

The Two Birthdays

2009-02-12T10:27:00.001-08:00

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born this day 200 years ago. I have lived 44 of my 58 years in five states which seceded. In the South historic memory is dogged by the shadow of Lincoln’s adamantine resolve. This is true for two reasons: 1) With the exceptions of Gettysburg and Antietam the ground war was fought on Southern soil. 2) We lost.

And it was better that we lost.

Nearly unanimous among Southerners is the conviction that we fought to preserve States’ Rights not slavery. I adopt the thesis myself. Only a small fraction of Southerners owned slaves. Sharecroppers were generously represented among my own ancestors. Our family were more in danger of becoming slaves themselves than of owning slaves.

Not that danger lay all in one direction.

It sounds callous to insist that one thing nearly as bad as being owned by another human being is to own another human being. But I do insist. We must measure comparative misfortune by considerations beyond the limit of our biological life. Once we are dead the proposition that those sinned against have the advantage over those who sin will have been validated. Those who enlist the Bible in support of slavery are theologically confused. The moral ruin visited upon the slave owner is too little commented upon. By this I mean sexual temptation. Thomas Jefferson was no anomaly. Many who were called Christians were guilty of the same offense.

Which brings me back to my contention that it was better to lose. It may be that the South would have turned toward Emancipation in time without a war. But by 1861 delay was unconscionable. Would that God had granted a Wilberforce to America. Whether ending slavery by 1865 was worth the cumulative agony of the killed, the maimed, and the bereaved only God can say.

Though my great-grandfather’s brother fell at Gettysburg I am grateful to Lincoln for more than preserving the Union, whatever his motives may have been.

For this I say Happy Birthday.

We live in a world shaped intellectually and practically by Charles Darwin. Darwin’s conclusions were part biology, part metaphysics, and part intuition. When students who are new believers ask about evolution I ask them to study two kinds of people: Real Christians who are evolutionists and real scientists who believe in Creation. Of the former there are many: In the latter category there are a few. I am neither. The word ‘Creationist’ is under assault. Soon, like the word ‘Fundamentalist’, it may be all but abandoned. Just as thoughtful Fundamentalists began to feel more comfortable calling themselves Evangelicals, so the Creationists seek shelter under the umbrella of Intelligent Design. I’m not quite ready to throw the word ‘Creationist’ overboard. One should never allow one’s ideological enemies to dictate the terms of self designation.

Though evolution within species is irrefutable, I do not believe that man is the latest product of an evolutionary process, nor do I believe that Adam had organic antecedents.

I end with something positive about Darwin. It is, after all, his 200th. By his tri-centennial I will have long moved in circles where his views are wholly discredited. So I take the opportunity while I have it.

I commend Charles Darwin for his missionary ardor and incessant labor. Darwin signed on as a ship’s naturalist on the Beagle at a time when surviving a long sea voyage was not a good bet. He remained on that ship for nearly five years (1831-1836). His findings (to my lay and non-scientific mind) were mischievously construed. But I give him this: He was passionate about discovery and declaration, and he prosecuted his task with vigor. In that he is a model for Christians.

And for that I say Happy Birthday.

Missions in the Russian Winter

2009-02-05T23:57:00.000-08:00

I write from Kursk, Russia, eight hours south of Moscow. Kursk is the city which gave its name to the doomed submarine.
Russia overwhelms before it swallows. It is a place of vast expanses, pitiless weather, and an interminable trudging populace. It is February in the Russian winter.
Last night I visited one of the two American families in residence. It was my first trip out of doors since arriving Monday morning. This couple and their two children are five years into the experiment. They do not call themselves missionaries,but they are. Missionaries are my heroes. Little wonder that I try to imitate them. The wife is a math teacher fluent in French. The husband is a practitioner of the Ignatian exercises. I promise to tell you what that means once I learn myself.
I am accompanied by the blind genius Oleg Shevkun. He makes me a force in Russian. He spins gold from straw. Oleg is the best interpreter in Russia.His humor lights up the church. His voice graces the radio. Sadly, today he lost that voice. Our quarters are close. We make an eccentric household. Eccentricity is not an unfamiliar charge for me. Oleg is not entirely centric himself.
Oleg's voice will return tomorrow and we will begin again.
We are training pastors, women's leaders and students.
They are ravenous for God's Word and we try to help.
Vladimir Putin notwithstanding, Jesus is King over Russia.
He reigns from heaven above.
In fact Jesus is Lord over the whole universe.
How I love telling it out.
I grow old, but I am grateful.
It's cold outside.
But I don't care.

THE AMAZING STAR-BREATHER

2009-01-30T11:07:00.000-08:00

John Updike died this week. In the past year we’ve lost Norman Mailer, William Buckley, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well .Frankly I don’t feel so well myself.
So I’d better write something today.
Track these four threads with me please.
1. I was born in Atlanta and grew up in a suburb .For my first 25 years I knew I’d never be able to live far away. Venturing to Dallas for Seminary stretched me no end. I felt like Ferdinand Magellan. As it turns out I haven’t lived in Georgia since 1972-- the year I finished college.
2. Through the years I heard from home-town friends about Louie Giglio, who spreads the fame of Jesus from North Atlanta.
3. Four years ago I was taking out the trash at my mother’s house in Flowery Branch, Georgia. I don’t take the trash out often so the memory is vivid. Nearby a lady I’d never seen was parting with a little trash of her own. She asked:” Are you Ronnie Stevens?” Stalling for time as I pondered my next move I recklessly admitted to the charge.
Her first name is gone from memory, but she registered her surname as Giglio. I said I was pleased to make her acquaintance, and asked if she were related to LOUIE Giglio. She confided that he was her son. Turns out my own mother had been regaling Mrs. Giglio (whose friend was a neighbor) with tales of her own missionary son. Mrs. G., a budding trivia expert in her own right, had somehow remembered my name. “How do you know Louie?” she asked. “I don’t know Louie,” I answered. “Your son is famous.”
Now that’s a line bound to make any mother feel those tiresome trash-disposal efforts are well worth the trouble. I’m sure I hoped the encounter would lead to joint ministry at some dazzling venue.
Alas it was not to be.
In fact I never saw Louie Giglio’s face or heard his voice until today
And today only on DVD.
4. Last Sunday after worship a young Hungarian put the DVD into my hand. He asked if I knew Louie Giglio. I had waited almost 5 years for that opening so I pounced immediately, “No, but I know his mother.” He told me I had to watch the presentation. Not only I, but the whole Congregation as well. Such was the lad’s fervor.
Well today I did watch. The talk is called HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD. I know the expression is dated and of suspect provenance, but the words ‘mind blowing’ are not amiss.
The title is more than justified. Louie begins with a survey of the macrocosm. Think immensity. Prominent among the projected images is the black hole at the center of the Whirlpool Galaxy perched at an angle perpendicular to our own. The image of that galaxy center is shaped like a Cross. Perhaps I should say “THE CROSS”. As he descends to the microcosm he explores the wonders of human conception, the way eyesight is conferred, the human genome and, finally, the subject of laminin –the substance which holds our cells together. Turns out the structure of laminin is also cross shaped.
The juxtaposition, shaped by a master communicator, was powerfully wrought. There was a running exposition of Psalm 33 throughout.
“By the Word of the Lord the heavens were made
And by the breath of His mouth all their hosts.”
The’ hosts’, of course, are the heavenly bodies.
He calls God THE STAR BREATHER. And when he moved in toward the Cross he declared that THE STAR BREATHER BECAME THE SIN-BEARER!
You can view an excerpt at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e4zgJXPpI4
I hope you get the 40 minute segment entire.
The effort won’t disappoint.
Hands could be raised.
Tears could be shed.
And that would be entirely appropriate.
THE STAR-BREATHER IS AN AWESOME GOD.

The White House and My House

2009-01-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

For the last five weeks an African refugee from our church has been staying in our home. His name is Stephen. It is an easy hospitality for me to extend as Jane is still in the US . It is not an unselfish hospitality. Stephen cooks and I do not. For the last five days Stephen has been glued to CNN. I can hear him downstairs clapping, laughing, shouting amen. Stephen has never visited America . He was born in Cameroon . He has not seen his wife or children for ten years. His Hungarian visa does not allow him to work. For that reason he is homeless. He has precious little to celebrate.
But he is celebrating. He is celebrating because the President of the United States had an African father. Stephen’s sense of participation and enfranchisement through Barack Obama’s presidency is profound.
I share some of Stephen’s enthusiasm. Our new President is brilliant, stylish and a soaring orator. He has a beautiful family. We’ve not had a President this winsome since Ronald Reagan. No President has inspired so much hope since Franklin Roosevelt. I doubt if even George Washington himself entered office with such a tailwind. He’ll need the momentum. Oratory won’t count for much with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Kim Jong-il.
I wish our President well. Our country wearied of the last President. Our war aims are not clear. Our economy is…well… you know. Were it not for this fresh start our country would be in near despair.
In the years I have been a Christian the Lord has blessed individuals and ministries I didn’t expect Him to bless. The Lord has blessed individuals and ministries I would not have blessed. And, candidly, He has blessed individuals and ministries I did not want Him to bless. This is so because He is wise and I am not. This is so because He is gracious and I am not. This is so because He is God.
But I do want Him to bless President Obama. The very name ‘Barack’ means ‘blessed.’ As his name is so let him be. I want that blessing because of Iraq and Afghanistan. I want that blessing because I have friends who’ve lost jobs. I want it most of all because I want African-Americans to bask in their own contribution to American achievement.
I want it for lots of reasons.
But I did not vote for Barack Obama.
And I would never vote for him.
This week he called for hope and opportunity.
This week he reached out to “gay and straight.”
In the past he has looked with favor on decriminalizing 20 million guilty who entered our country illegally.
Notably excluded from the comprehensive amnesty and good will are the only truly innocent—children yet unborn. They will be denied not only the right to live in America but the right to live at all.
They will be scorched, poisoned and dismembered in their mothers’ wombs.
Whither hope and opportunity for these?
I have heard the charges of simple-mindedness and shallowness leveled at one issue voters.
I have heard Christian opinion-makers like Jim Wallis and Donald Miller tell me there are other humanitarian issues to be considered beyond the slaughter of the unborn and the Democratic Party scores well on those.
I have Democrat friends who are godly and intelligent who tell me to get over it.
But I can’t.
And I never will.

Resolution, Reckoning and the Hidden Life

2009-01-23T03:37:00.001-08:00

…reckon…yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:11

Many of our New Year’s resolutions will have been forgotten by now. January fuels the determination that things will be different this time. But experience is cruel. The former patterns tend to reassert themselves. .
Yet Scripture requires that we ‘reckon.’ We class reckoning and resolution as similar if not identical things. The word ‘reckon’ is from an older translation. More modern versions translate the original Greek with words like ‘consider’. Still, the older term is better.
The command to reckon is the first command in the book of Romans. Scripture never calls us to mindless activism. Truth must supply a motive for effort. And truth must be ascertained. The great Apostle establishes the foundational truth for this reckoning through five chapters and ten verses.
That truth as expounded by Paul has to do with the Death and Resurrection of the Holy One. The death of Christ is a cosmic event with personal consequences. Time, eternity, and the universe itself are all permanently changed by the death of God’s Son. By Christ’s death, death is slain, disarmed, its terror voided. Through His Resurrection our own life is elevated above an animal existence, invested with a purpose which would have been impossible had the sinless Savior disintegrated in His grave.
Resolution is like reckoning in that it expresses the intention that real change be effected. Yet there remain differences between biblical reckoning and our normal approach to resolution.
1. Resolution is usually self-regarding. Reckoning requires a concentration on Christ and His achievement.
2. Resolution is the determination that change must take place. Reckoning is the recognition that change has taken place.
3. Resolution looks mainly toward the future. Reckoning is ever conscious of the past. Two thousand years ago in Jerusalem the Son of God died to break sin’s power. The Cross is the focus of reckoning. Resolution hopes for a new reality. Reckoning flows from a new reality
4. Resolution is the attempt to attain a goal. Reckoning is the appropriation of a fact.
5. Resolution succeeds by human will. Reckoning advances by faith.
Christianity is very much an interior phenomenon. Jesus declared such when He denounced anger in addition to murder, lust in addition to adultery. God’s demand for purity in the inward life defined Jesus’ controversy with the Pharisees. If a cup is dirty on the inside it matters little if the outside is washed. Repentance, belief, joy and reckoning are all functions of an inward consciousness.
Over 30 years ago an obscure author named Miles Stanford (1914-99) wrote a spiritual life trilogy first published privately. The last of the three (after ‘The Principle of Position’ and ‘The Green Letters’) was called ‘The Reckoning that Counts.’ The little book (get it if you can) was an exposition of the Romans 6:11 theme. I regard it as a minor classic. There is a current obsession with making ministry ‘work’ through technique. Ought there not to be a prior concern with making the Christian life work –seeing that life lived out practically as prescribed by the Lord and His Apostles? When we say “lived out practically” we mean obedience: consistent, self-denying, joyous.
In the end “success” will be defined by God Himself.
When we understand that definition we can be sure it will have to do with what is happening on the inside, with what Scripture calls ‘the heart’.
Let us give ourselves to the cultivation of those interior spaces.
Let us resolve to reckon.

Fire and the Fading Year

2008-12-29T23:03:00.000-08:00

"...I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza..." Amos 1:7

There is an old spiritual centered on the promise that the world will nevermore be destroyed by water. The assurance to Noah does not mean all judgment will be averted. Hence the song includes the words: "...the fire next time." War recurs in the Mid-East by reason of wounds of long bleeding. The conflict is protracted. The conflict was predicted. The conflict will not abate until the coming of the Son of Man. Our former UN Ambassador mentioned the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran between the election and the inauguration. The idea is that Iran's nuclear program must be stopped. If Israel attacks during the transition between two Administrations, immediate American pressure to desist is less likely. In an article in the London Times Britain's former Foreign Minister (David Owen) urged Israel to resist any inclination to attack. At this moment the fire is falling on Gaza not Iran. One day it will fall over the entire earth. I once heard Eric Alexander say that one who refuses the salvation offered in Christ Jesus has no shelter from the wrath of God. It is a truth seldom emphasized in our day. It was the special province of a prophet to warn. But pity the poor pastor who makes his congregation uncomfortable today. When we insist that sermons merely palliate and congratulate (a famous West Coast Pastor just demoted his own son for deviating from that path) we divest our pulpits of the prophetic. It is a trend much to be lamented. While Gazans flee the fire this time we note that there will be a fire next time.
If we have shelter well and good.
Let us press the urgency of shelter upon those who don't. Leisure is ill-suited to this task.
The number of allotted years is fixed and finite.
And the year we're in is fading.

2008-12-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from our family to yours
Photo taken in Memphis Tennessee December 24th 2008

The Festival of the Born King

2008-12-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

“Where is He who is born King of the Jews?” Matthew 2:2

Alec Motyer, the Anglican Old Testament scholar, called Isaiah 9:6 the prophecy of ‘God come to be born.’ The notion that God could be born was an idea without precedent. Just so, babies are not kings at the moment of their birth.

Edward VII (d. 1910) was not king when he was born; his mother Queen Victoria was on the throne. She was still on the throne when her grandson George V (d. 1936) was born. It was the same with Edward VIII and George VI. Babies wait their turn. They wait on their own maturity as well as the death of the previous monarch.

The exception of course was Bethlehem. Jesus did not ascend to the throne—He descended. He came from the higher heavenly place to the earthly. He came not to be an earthly king but the earthly king. The star proclaimed it. Magi believed it. Christians celebrate it.

So come, let us adore Him, born the King of Angels.

Hymn to the Christ Child

2008-12-24T14:39:00.000-08:00

We greet Thee Lowly Babe
Near Bethlehem we heard your fame
Now draw we near to learn your Name
Sent to live with sinful men
Sent to be the Shepherds’ Friend

We sought Thee Lovely Babe
By Eastern Star we saw your sign
So rushed to make our treasure Thine
Brought gifts of myrrh and gifts of gold
Though great the distance, great the cold

We hail Thee Lordly Babe
From Heaven’s gate we hastened down
To share the joy the earth has found
To show the slaves, to tell the free
That angel hosts still worship Thee

Merry Christmas from Ronnie and Jane

Jonathan Edwards and What Isaiah Said About Christmas

2008-12-16T06:36:00.000-08:00

For unto us a Child is born; unto us, a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder. And His name shall be called: Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6

Some (including Yale Professor Perry Miller) have insisted that Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was the greatest philosophical reasoner born in North America . He was the first President of Princeton. Tragically he was also one of the first to die of small-pox vaccination. Just as tragically he was the first Pastor to be fired from the church his grandfather founded. Genius doesn’t always find a smooth path .

. My favorite Edwards' quote comes in his sermon on Revelation 5:5-6. While enlarging upon the possibility that a lion could be regarded as a lamb he remarked upon the “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies “ which we find in Christ Jesus. A lamb may have peculiar qualities (meekness, humility, innocence) . But those qualities are necessarily remote from the qualities of the lion (majesty, courage, tenacity). Not simply different but practically opposite. How can we imagine the combination of such opposites? That’s just it; we can’t IMAGINE . But God has manifested just such a thing.
We see the same unlikely combinations in the Christmas prophecy of Isaiah 9.One who is born is yet eternal. A child is able to hold the government upon his shoulder. A Son is also somehow called Father. Impossible? Of course--- but the thing happened. It happened in the broader context of that other impossibility: God became Man.
There are roughly 30 million gods in the Hindu pantheon.
In Hindu iconography there is an attempt to amalgamate the incompatible. One figure not an elephant has the trunk of an elephant.The image is grotesque. But when we come to know Jesus we behold previously unassimilated attributes in harmony. CS Lewis asked how anyone could entertain “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” and “I am meek and humble…” claims from the same person without protest. We would protest unless we witness some unanticipated consistency in the claimant which renders those opposites congruent.
In Jesus the confluence is not grotesque but rather seamless, convincing, satisfying and real.
Beholding the Infant Deity in Bethlehem we note another set of blended opposites. Something new is paired with something original. Did Matthew and Luke connive at the unscrupulously dishonest and the spiritually magnificent in the same fabrication? That would be yet another impossible combination.
The Incarnation is too sublime, too beyond the range of human imagining, to be invented.
By man He is uncontrived. As God He is uncreated.
We celebrate the historical event at Christmas. The Word of the Father is now in flesh appearing.
O come let us adore Him.
For He is the admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.

Bach - Magnificat - 01 - Magnificat

2008-12-16T06:32:00.001-08:00

Christmas Music as an Apologetic.

2008-12-13T08:32:00.001-08:00

National Public Radio consistently projects what we may fairly call a secular point of view. There’s nothing which feels quite so secular as listening to NPR on a Sunday morning. All Things Considered, the long running evening news magazine is a liberal broadcast which few conservatives can resist. Years ago near Christmas I was listening to ATC when a woman commentator shared the challenge of being Jewish in America at Christmas. I wish I could remember her name. What she said was cordial and insightful. As she wrapped it up she conceded wistfully that Christmas had quite simply inspired the greatest music in the history of the world. That admission contained a sigh and a signal.
Even Richard Dawkins (who succeeded Bertrand Russell and Madalyn Murray O’Hair as the world’s most famous atheist) has admitted to being a "cultural Christian." The foundation for so startling a confession.? He found the singing of English Christmas carols to be irresistible. There is a truth and power in music whose source is not yet fully comprehended. Music is the registry of an unarticulated native reality. The power of music offered in praise suggests that though God’s truth can be denied the beauty which radiates from that truth cannot go unadmired. Music which praises God’s majesty reflects God's majesty. The music of Christmas, like the message of Christmas resonates with something deeper than the mere recognition of excellence.
As thinkers like H R Rookmaaker, Calvin Seerveld and Jeremy Begbie have taken pains to point out there is an undeniable conncection between aesthetics and apologetics. By apologetics we mean the effort to substantiate the truth claims of Christianity by the marshalling of evidence. That effort necessarily involves the refutation of error.
Where are the hymns of the cults?
If they exist I’m sure they are not worth singing. That the world is fallen means that much which is unspeakable proceeds apparently unabated. But God has drawn a line in some places. Let’s face it ,the world has produced powerful and appealing music which may be sensual, romantic, patriotic, or whimsical. But God’s sovereign providence has not allowed a corresponding volume of appealing music to be produced in the service of false worship.
Nowhere does the superiority of Christian music show itself more dramatically than in the music of Christmas. The season does not adorn the theology. The theology adorns the season. The traditions are invested with beauty and wonder by the augmentation of historical reality.
Christmas happened in Bethlehem .
Angels announced it.
Shepherds found it.
Magi searched for it.
Herod feared it.
The facts sound prosaic enough but when we respond to the facts reverently the music and poetry begin to flow. The thing becomes first luminous, then overwhelming.
We offer a bit of the Bach 'Magnificat' as Exhibit A.
After which I rest my case.
When we hear this news can anyone keep from singing?
Richard Dawkins could not.

Nor can I.

That Song I Like

2008-12-13T08:28:00.000-08:00

There’s no accounting for taste.
I tilt toward the traditional in the worship wars. But must we war? And must we take sides?
Once in Memphis I waxed rhapsodic about Graham Kendrick’s “Knowing You Jesus”, at that time my favorite contemporary Christian song. A friend whose tastes are a bit more traditional than my own challenged me on the line in that song which says: “You’re the best...” . What could I say? She was right. The sentiment is true but trite and excessively casual. I suppose it’s there because it rhymes with the line before. But the song moves me nonetheless.
I know little about any genre of music but I am especially ignorant of Contemporary Christian Music. In November ,2007, I joined some YWAMERs (Youth With A Mission) for a week of study in Budapest . During their worship segment they sang a song I had never heard. I liked it so much I asked them if they would come to our church that Sunday and teach it to us. They were bound for places like Romania , Armenia and Egypt but they made time on the Sunday to drop in. It wasn’t a new song. Lots of people had heard it but somehow it had passed me by. Neither was it a song which had generated a lot of excitement. Nor can I say that the words are anything special. I found myself wanting to rewrite in parts. But the combination of the words and the music got to me all the same and made me want to worship. The words are an invocation –what some would call a bidding prayer. The YWAM team showed up and did as I asked, but I don’t think anyone was impressed like I was.
The next day I flew to the Mid-East.The plane landed at 4 in the morning. I was met by my driver, a National with a big moustache and a small gun. Then there was an American colleague who lives in country part of the year. We had a three hour drive ahead of us. The two of them discussed the advisability of leaving while it was dark. They thought it best to visit the restaurant and wait out the dawn. Finding the restaurant closed they shrugged, and we set out. No one asked me. I won’t say I was scared ,but if I had been offered an escort by The Light Brigade I would not have turned them down.
Our driver pushed in a cassette (remember those) and guess what?
I think it was the third song.
It was as if the Lord was saying “Did you forget that I’m sovereign over this space as well?”
I know I haven’t told you the name of song.
But if you click on below you can listen.
And , if you don’t like, it well…
There’s no accounting for taste.

Meet With Me Ten Shekel Shirt Worship Video

2008-12-13T08:27:00.001-08:00

Milton on His 400th

2008-12-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

In the third year of our marriage Jane and I walked into an Antique Shop in Goldsboro North Carolina . We walked out with a portrait of Milton and his three daughters. That picture has hung in every place we’ve ever stayed. We didn’t know the artist was Hungarian (Michael Munkacsy-a reproduction of course), still less did we know we would one day live in Hungary where Jane would lecture on Art.
While I was a student I learned that Milton is the second greatest poet in English behind-who else-Will Shakespeare. For the record Geoffrey Chaucer ran a strong third. I do not know who makes these determinations or how authoritative they are but that one sounds reasonable. Paradise Lost is always dreaded (by all but the most literary) and often encountered by students of every generation. A classic has been defined as a masterpiece we want not to read but to have read. Paradise Lost is nothing if not a classic.
It is not only a poem but a theodicy. That is it is an effort (as the poet plainly admits) to justify the ways of God to man. These apologetic aims were subverted by the reality that Milton did not always deploy biblical arguments. Though his Christianity was highly publicized he was in fact heretical on the doctrine of Christ’s Person. The more serious drawback though (and it’s a shocker) is the charge that Milton made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. If that were true (my knowledge of the poem is too superficial to weigh in on this one) it would obviously spoil the thing for the likes of simple Christians like myself.
I encountered the “Satan as hero” thesis quite by accident just today while reading an interview with the Roman Catholic apologist Dinesh D’Souza, a powerful ally in our conflict with the New Atheists. You may consult Dinesh’s analysis for yourself at

http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo7/7segelstein.php

My own favorite Milton quotes range beyond Paradise Lost:
In his essay against censorship called ‘Areopagitica’ Milton contends that truth or virtue is only praiseworthy if it has been tested. And tests only come by battles with antagonistic points of view. Nothing, he maintained, should be banned from the field by decree but rather vanquished in the field by debate.
His arguments, though always appealing and sometimes noble, are not always biblical or wise. But his phraseology is irresistible. About these untested convictions he wrote:
“I cannot praise a fugitive or a cloistered virtue.”
He meant he couldn’t admire a virtue which runs away or a truth which hides. Stirring stuff that.
In ‘Lycidas’ he wrote the words:
“ To scorn delights and live laborious days”
This is an ideal I’ve always admired but seldom applied. Milton well articulates an approach to work I would aspire to. He writes a similar thing when he characterizes his personal view of his own calling and the legacy he hopes to leave.
“By labor and intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die." (Reason of Church Government)
I’d say he succeeded.
Happy Birthday John Milton. We have few poets today and we are the poorer for it.
And we have none like you.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

2008-11-27T01:48:00.000-08:00

Pity the poor atheist who feels grateful but finds no one to thank.

It’s different with us.
Thank God our Benefactor sought us out.
Thank God we know His Name.

The Hebrew scholar Bruce Waltke taught me the Psalms in the early 70s. Once in class he told how his son Jonathan had often to be interrupted while saying grace. The problem was Jonathan’s endless elaboration of particulars. First he would give thanks for the toast. Then he would offer thanks for the butter on the toast, followed, as night follows day, by the jam. The toast having yielded up its three spheres, he would then turn with relish to the eggs. Those key breakfast crucialities, the salt and pepper, were seldom forgotten.

I know now that the Jonathans of the world should never be reined in. Such men are rare. Let them be unleashed.

I was born in Atlanta and we enjoyed the local rituals. The Georgia-Georgia Tech freshman football game was always played on Thanksgiving Day. Furman Bisher was the Sports Editor of the Atlanta Journal. He was a prose stylist of a high order. As far as I know he never registered any special Christian conviction, though he always ended each column with ‘Selah.’ Every Thanksgiving he wrote a much anticipated piece on what he was thankful for. Furman Bisher had his 90th birthday this month. That column is in the Atlanta paper today.

My favorite all-time quote has to do with Thanksgiving. It comes from John Calvin, the French-Swiss theologian whose 500th we celebrate next year. Calvin wrote, “To be human is to be that part of the cosmos which responds to the goodness of God with gratitude.” One reason I find this exciting is because convincing definitions of the human are elusive. It’s harder than we think to determine just what Man is--especially when we stray outside the biblical framework. The Marxists insisted the key to the definition was economic; the Fascists, racial; the Freudians, psycho-sexual; and so on. They were wrong, of course. But Calvin gets to the heart of it.

Scripture teaches that Man is a fallen image bearer who can only be rescued by a Wounded Healer. I am grateful for that rescue. I wish I were so learned that I could claim to have discovered the Calvin quote in the primary sources. I did not. It was in a book called Philosophers who Believe and the reference was cited by Nicholas Woltersdorf, the retired philosopher at Yale. He insisted that he was writing not as a philosopher and not even as a Christian particularly, but as the father of a son who died. He lost his 25 year old in a mountain climbing accident in Austria. In the teeth of the sorrow he was grappling with the question, “Is God still good, and am I still grateful?” Dostoyevsky called man the “ungrateful biped.” Calvin’s point was that if we sink below gratitude for God’s goodness, we sink below the level of the human. We humans are a product of design, and we were designed to give thanks to God.

Jane and I send Thanksgiving Greetings from the old Hungarian capital.
They don’t mark the date here, but we will have fellowship with those who do.

Jonathan, wherever you are, I hope you’re still at it.
May your tribe increase.

Another Anniversary

2008-11-23T12:46:00.000-08:00

November 23rd marks the anniversary of Blaise Pascal’s conversion in 1654.
Though Pascal died short of his 40th birthday his achievement, like his intellect, was towering.
He counted all as nothing in comparison to knowing Christ.
Voltaire, that great cynic of the Enlightenment, loathed Pascal’s theology but declared that Pascal was the greatest man ever to have written in French. He attributed Pascal’s conversion to trauma from a carriage accident which triggered a breakdown leading to religious mania. It is notable that for all his mocking Voltaire cried out to Jesus for mercy on his deathbed. He’d made a famous prediction that 100 years after his death the Bible would be found only in museums.Voltaire’s house is now owned by the Swiss Bible Society. Sweet irony that.
Pascal wrote an account of his conversion and sewed the parchment into his jacket. When he obtained new clothes he would repeat the process. It was found after his death. Evidently he kept it with him to the end of his life .In that testimony one paragraph is headed by the simple word: FIRE
Os Guiness declared that Pascal became a man consumed by divine fire.
In that same record he wrote: “The world forgotten; everything except God…Complete and sweet renunciation.”
He told no one about his conversion. However he did overwhelm everyone with the evidence.
His sister Jacqueline later wrote, “Little by little he changed, so that soon I no longer knew him.”
A Pascal is given to the Church once every century or so.
Let us thank God for his memory.
Let us imitate his fervor.
Let us pray for his successors.

A Note on the Anniversary: 45 Years On

2008-11-22T07:21:00.001-08:00

Every American my age or older knows where he was the day C.S. Lewis died. Most remember unwittingly. The great man died in Oxford around the same hour John Kennedy was shot in Dallas. November 22nd, 1963, leaves us with more than one reason for remembering.

Some Christians progress through a C.S. Lewis phase which leads on later to something else. Call it a fixation, but the phase never left me. I hope it never does. Far from abating, the lucidity of CSL’s logic and the purity of his prose arrests my attention and commands my admiration more and more each passing year.

The individuality of Lewis’ practically articulated theology frustrates many Evangelicals. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, born the year after Lewis, whose brother knew Lewis at Oxford, went so far as to suggest that Lewis’ conversion may have been solely intellectual. I am impressed emphatically to the contrary. While unexposed to many emphases of evangelical conviction, Lewis hammered out a relatively evangelical theology in virtual isolation. He eschewed the label ‘evangelical’ because he eschewed all labels except for ‘Christian.’ He was the quintessential ‘Mere Christian.’ Although Lewis may line up with evangelical theology only 85% of the time, it is more or less universally agreed that he expresses that 85% more elegantly and convincingly than those who agree with us at a rate of 99% plus. As for the other 15% let us regret but let us also remember that Lewis had no truly conservative biblical influences. He had no evangelical mentors or heroes (with the possible exception of Bunyan). His wide learning and his Bible reading alone led him to a conviction of the rightness of orthodox Christian doctrine.

Among those of his friends who took Christianity seriously many were Roman Catholic. These included his physician, R.E. Havard, his favorite pupils, Bede Griffiths and George Sayer, and his closest Oxford faculty colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien. There have been revisionist efforts to claim CSL as a closet Roman Catholic. This point of view is abetted by the Catholic enthusiasms of Walter Hooper, Lewis’ last secretary and literary executor. Lewis’ generosity toward Roman Catholics is better explained by the aforementioned friendships and a determination to distance himself from the anti-Catholic postures associated with the Belfast of his youth. On the Person and Work of Christ and the supremacy of Christian claims over against all other religions Lewis was thoroughly biblical. Evangelicals better trained and more theologically acute have been less effective in wooing 20th century skeptics toward the Savior. Lewis was (sadly) Arminian, but it is a demonstration of sovereignty that God would appoint an Arminian layman devoid of biblical training to be such a powerful force in putting across the Christian message.

Lewis’ personal life, though not without blemish, was admirable on the whole. It is true that he likely only fell in love twice in his life and both times with married women. The record of his dealings with the first (much older) woman was shameful to a high degree. In his defense he was a naïve and atheistic youth at the time the liaison began. One could wish that he had worked harder to save Joy Gresham’s marriage. But, as some who knew them well (including members of her own family who are committed believers) are still alive and able to represent this part of CSL’s life, it is perhaps better to maintain a courteous reticence.

But there is much to be celebrated in his life as well as his writings. He was a wounded war hero. He lived a life of strict frugality so that he could sustain a record of rare generosity in giving away much of the material assets which passed through his hands. He was indefatigable in his labors. The demands of his professional life were such that his enormous contribution to Christian efforts was offered in the context of great personal sacrifice in moments he could eke out after duties to his University and his household were discharged.

We may thank God for such a gift. C.S. Lewis and Winston Churchill were born on successive days (November 29th - 30) in different years (1898, 1874). Churchill and Lewis died in the same 14-month period. Just as we search in vain for Churchill’s successor in the realm of world politics, so we search in vain for Lewis’ successor in the world of apologetics. While we wait, we remember.

And we are grateful.

The Paradox and Proof of Variegated Praise

2008-11-22T06:45:00.000-08:00

Long ago in Romania I noted a sure portent of the coming Communist collapse. It was during the rule of the wretch Ceausescu. I was meeting with university students in Bucharest. The young American missionaries who organized the meetings now live in Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. One has moved back to Colorado with his Romanian wife. The balcony of the flat where they lived faced toward an inner courtyard. Here in Budapest we are fond of calling those monochromatic blocks “Commie Condos.” They litter the Eastern European cityscapes reminding us that Communism was an enemy of aesthetics as well as freedom.

Algernon Swinburne, the Victorian skeptic and poet, declared that the world had grown grey from the breath of Christ. A pity he died before the advent of the Communist era (and it’s a mercy we’ve lived past the death of the Communist era). Perhaps the visual evidence provided by societies determined to deny Christ would have convinced him of the idiocy of his assertion. God made the sky blue and the leaf green. Spiritually it is the atheist who pollutes and defoliates. It is the secularist who drains the earth of color. It was Jesus who (in the words of Calvin Seerveld) brought rainbows to the fallen world.

The balcony where I stood in Bucharest was on an upper floor. I looked down on an aged Romanian woman lovingly tending the flowers in her window box. Those blossoms were a riot of color, splendid in contrast to the dull greys and browns which dominated the hideous background. She was obviously poor, as was nearly everyone in Romania and certainly everyone in that particular apartment building. But at the impulse of her private, creative reflex she brought forth more loveliness than the regime who rendered her life arduous and her nation ugly. I thought in that moment, “Ceausescu won’t win. God has left a testimony to his beauty in that solitary gardener. She is proof enough that the beauty which endured is the beauty which will prevail.”

I was overwhelmed with a similar impression on my first visit to Eastern Europe in 1987. The indigenous Christian music produced by marginalized Hungarian Christians meeting in secret was surpassingly beautiful. I never thought I would hear its equal.

But I did.

Later that year I met in secret with a few university students in Brno, Czechoslovakia. That group was forced to observe even greater measures to insure secrecy. The Moravian and Slovak Christians who emerged from the blight of Communism began to compose their own extraordinary versions of Christian music in their native idiom. The most impressive songwriter I met during those early days was a young Moravian girl named Lenca. She remains impressive. Last Tuesday evening at a student meeting in Brno I heard Lenca (now a mother of two working with her husband in ministry) playing her guitar and singing Christian songs.. I’ll do what I can to make her music available on this site soon.

Christ is the Savior of the whole world. He is the coming King and His reign is universal. The praise offered His name by Christians in disparate places is strikingly familiar and startlingly different at the same time. It is this paradox which provides another piece of evidence that though we come from radically different origins, through radically different experiences, we arrive at the same radical conclusion:

There is one God who made heaven and earth and Jesus of Nazareth is His Son.

It makes us want to sing.

Why “Jacob’s Limp”?

2008-11-22T06:42:00.000-08:00

There is another inhabitant of the blogsphere calling his entries “Jacob’s Limp.” So we are only able to use that designation as a subtitle.

Bible students will instantly recognize the reference to Genesis 32. On his flight to Haran, God sent Jacob a Vision (Gen. 28). This was the famous dream sequence of the ladder. Twenty years later on his way back home God sent Jacob a Visitor. His identity is revealed by degrees. We believe the “man” Jacob wrestled with was none other than the Angel of the Lord, the usual Old Testament designation for the pre-Incarnate Christ.

That struggle is a picture of prevailing prayer. God allows Himself to be persuaded to do something He desired all along. (We see the pattern articulated in Ezekiel 36:37.)

Speed had served Jacob well during his career up to that point. That career was characterized by determination to gain by rascality what God would have granted by grace. Thus he hastened to Isaac’s side when Esau went out to hunt (Gen. 27:18-19). Thus he fled Canaan to escape his offended brother’s wrath (Gen. 28:5). Thus he fled his father-in-law (Gen. 31). Doubtless he planned to rely on speed if evasive measures were necessary during the coming confrontation with Esau, but the Man he grappled with took that option away (Gen. 32:25). When the Man whom Jacob called God took His leave, Jacob limped away from the place he called Peniel.

An encounter with the Living God renews our conviction that reliance upon self is folly. Any resource the self can muster independent of God is a liability. Jacob’s Limp was a consecrated weakness. Jacob’s Limp made it more likely that the patriarch would run with dependence on the strength of God because his own strength had been diminished. The wound accelerated the weaning from self.

Let us thank God for such wounds.
Let us welcome them with gratitude.
Let us regard them as favors.

May we receive from God those blessed weakenings
which make dependence upon Him the more necessary.

Others boast of strength.
Let us rather boast of weakness.
Let others leap for joy.
For us this limp suffices.
And we rejoice the more.