Elizabeth II Rocks

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

(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

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...

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

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

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

"... 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

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?

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.