Pastor's Page: January 20, 2009:

"A Life Incongruent With Who You Are"

A psychologist wrote to the Chicago Tribune's "Dear Amy" advising her to be careful about dismissing suspicions that a prospective bridegroom was homosexual. He said that there were two cases in his family where women married men who turned out to be gay, and both marriages ended badly. In one case, the man knew he was gay but lived in self-denial; the other "found out" his sexual preference much later. Both men were married for years and had several children before they destroyed their families.

The psychologist believed it was wrong for these men to marry women in the first place, and maybe he was right. But then he concluded, "Being gay is really OK. However, trying to live a life that is incongruent with who you are does not work."

Really? It doesn't work? Sure it does. Or it can. Every decent man who has ever lived has struggled to live a life incongruent with who he was.

For example, most men - over 90 percent, I think - are inherently blay. (Don't look up "blay" in the dictionary: I've had to coin the term because I don't know a name for this condition.) A blay man is one who is not naturally attracted to one particular woman through the course of her life as she ages, changes, and loses the bloom of her youth. Instead, he is naturally and irreversibly attracted to multiple women who are roughly in the 18-30 year age range. Now, a blay man might manage to remain faithful to one woman through a 60-year marriage - but that is only because he chooses to live in denial. He puts up a false front, so to speak, and deliberately lives a life "incongruent with who he is." In his heart, he's flamingly blay whether he admits it or not.

A key feature of blayness is that it is simply "there" as one's built-in sexual orientation. No one chooses it. I know I didn't choose to be blay. Most men of my generation discovered we were blay when, around age 11, it became apparent that Farrah Fawcett Majors and Cheryl Tiegs were so much more appealing to us than the girls of our own age and acquaintance. Popular Islam acknowledges the existence of blay tendencies when it pictures heavenly bliss as the possession of a harem of 72 willing virgins. (Wow! 72. I don't think I'm that blay.)

There are men who, having the resources, live a life completely congruent with their blayness. Hugh Hefner is one example. He has never seen the point of denying himself. His attitude is one that we see reflected in many people who indulge their natural tendencies and can proudly say that they "are who they are." Bernie Madoff, for example, has lived a life that is very congruent with his greedy acquisitiveness. Father John Goeghan lived a life congruent with his rapacious pedophilia. Jeffrey Dahmer lived a life congruent with his natural tendency toward same-specie gastronomy (cannibalism).

These all are or were bad men. It is just nonsense to praise them for living lives of "authentic existence" in accordance with their true inner natures. All moral suasion, and all human decency, depend crucially on the conviction that it is possible, and, in many cases, desirable and necessary, to live one's life in utter denial of one's natural tendencies. In fact, that is the kind of denial that virtually all married men must practice - whether they are gay or blay or anything else.

If you are now living a life congruent with who you are, repent.

Pastor's Page: January 13, 2009

My Surprising Take On Gay Marriage

I believe much of the evangelical church has made a mistake by publicly opposing the legalization of gay marriage.

Not because homosexual practice is acceptable for biblically minded Christians. It isn't. Leviticus 18:22 says that it is an abomination. Romans 1:26-27 calls it unnatural and indecent, worthy of punishment. And 1 Corinthians 6:9 mentions "male prostitutes and homosexual offenders" in a list of those who will not inherit the kingdom of God. There isn't a smidgeon of ambiguity about the matter in either the Old or New Testaments. Homosexual practice is a sin just like adultery is a sin, or stealing, or refusing to work to support your family, or dishonoring your parents, or exploiting the weak, or greedily accumulating personal wealth, or worshiping idols, or getting drunk, or refusing to help the needy. Lots of different kinds of sins are condemned in the Bible, and same-gender erotic love is one of them. If you want to be a Christian, you can't have gay sex.

I acknowledge that I personally have lucked out in this matter. I don't do gay sex because I am not tempted to it, and find that it is no sacrifice at all to avoid it. But I am supremely unlucky in so many other ways because I am genetically, naturally conditioned to love a host of sins. There are plenty of things (oh God, why so many things?) where it really goes against my grain to be a Christian. This should not surprise me though, because Jesus gave fair warning that following him was hard: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). Crosses are not easy to bear, and anyone who thinks it's a snap to be a Christian doesn't have a clue about the sacrifice involved. Upon becoming Christians, alcoholics must bear the daily discipline of sobriety. Kleptomaniacs must learn to pay for their goods. Cowards must stand their ground while enduring ridicule and opposition. Hostile borderline personalities must try to love. Lazy people must work. The greedy must give generously. Horny people must limit themselves to one sexual partner. Frigid people must bear the burden of pleasing a spouse. And homosexuals must say, "Oh well. Darn it. Good-bye to all that, I guess." They are not alone. I deny that anyone is so naturally holy that, in following Christ, she does not painfully have to part with some sin, or, even more painfully, embrace a virtue foreign to her personality.

So homosexual behavior is one of many things that is out-of-bounds for Christians. But does that mean that Christians should push for laws that govern the sexual behaviors, preferences and alliances of those outside our community of faith? Not at all. I believe St. Paul speaks to the issue when he writes in 1 Corinthians 6:12: "What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?"

If we really wanted Christian morality to be the standard of public law we would hardly stop at homosexual behavior. In fact, we'd start with more mundane things like fornication and adultery. But have Christians anywhere put a proposition on a state-wide ballot that forbids unmarried people from sleeping together? Do we put adulterers in prison? Do we seek legally to forbid the remarriage of a man who divorces his wife without biblical warrant? All these things and more would be written into public legislation if we sought to identify the Bible's guide for Christians with our nation's code for citizens. It seems to me that practicing homosexuals have a point in saying, "Why are you zealots for Proposition 8 picking on me and my partner when, by your own standards, there is plenty of unaddressed sexual sin in your midst, and furthermore, the reason you're bringing the laws of the state to bear on our particular practice is because you can, because, with our numbers relatively small, you happen to be able to form a vast majority coalition with those who find our actions detestable?" Anyway, that's what I would say if I were a Californian non-Christian in love with a guy.

A sin is not worse just because it is rare or odd. In my judgment, a man who deserts or cheats on his wife is more evil than a man who has a life-long, monogamous relationship with another man. The latter, at least, has not betrayed a sacred trust.

Evangelicals paid a terrible price in campaigning publicly for the passage of gay marriage bans like the one in California. They won a "victory" there by a margin of 52-48, but were any hearts changed in the process? No. Instead, antagonisms were enflamed, and lines of battle more sharply drawn. Now Christians have a harder time getting a hearing for the proclamation of the gospel and the exaltation of Jesus. People who might have listened to Rick Warren talk about Christ are instead busy protesting his invocation at Obama's inauguration. (Because he came out in favor of Proposition 8, you see). I myself, as an evangelical pastor, have been asked by those unfamiliar with Christianity about the issue of gay marriage when I'd so much rather they be asking me about the divinity of Christ and his resurrection!

I don't believe the issue of gay marriage is worth fighting over. If asked (or challenged) about it, my attitude would be to shrug and say, "Go ahead and marry a fellow homosexual. I won't stand in your way. But it is something I could never do - even if I were constructed differently, and even if it were my heart's most cherished desire. I'm a Christian. I have to sacrifice lots of things to follow Christ."

Pastor's Page: January 6, 2009

"Is Yellow Round?" And The Question Of Eternal Security

The last two Sundays in a row I've been asked by different people whether a believer could lose his salvation. I have written on this subject before, and include below two essays from 2006 for reference' sake. I think I have something to add to that now.

I believe the question "Can a person lose his salvation?" is unanswerable. Not because only God knows the answer, and not because Scripture is ambiguous about it, but because the question itself is so ill-formed that it does not make sense.

I owe to C. S. Lewis the idea that some of our most basic questions will never yield answers, and that our deepened knowledge of God in the afterlife will not so much as give us solutions to our questions as it will reveal why so many of them were impossible in the first place. In "A Grief Observed", Lewis writes: Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical questions - are like that.

Exactly. If the question "Is yellow round?" were asked of you by a small child, what would you say? That yellow is a color and not a shape, that it is not the sort of thing that is round or square or triangular? But suppose he comes back with, "But the sun is yellow and it's round!" And you say yes, right, but the roundness of the sun is not a necessary feature of its yellowness. And he (precocious child) says, "Now you're just confusing me. All I want to know is whether or not yellow is round."

After having heard a thousand defenses of the doctrine of "once saved always saved" and (much more rarely) attacks on the same, I have now come to the conclusion that when we speak of the "possession" or "loss" of salvation we are perilously close to discussing something as meaningful as the shape of a color. Salvation is something God does to people who place enduring, living faith in Jesus Christ. It is not so much an object that we put in our pocket (like a wallet) and then debate about whether we can lose it or drop it or have it stolen from us. That is not to say that the metaphor of salvation-as-possession is wholly invalid. It is a useful and biblical metaphor, and has many good applications. But, like any metaphor, it has limits, and one of those limits is stretched and broken at the point where we begin talking about the possibility of losing it. Salvation can't be "lost" any more than yellow can be "round". In both discussions, if we do not qualify our terms, we will soon find that we are talking nonsense. Though "yellow" is neither round nor square, a yellow object like the sun is certainly very round. Likewise, though "salvation" is neither losable nor secure, a person who trusts in Christ with living, permanent faith is safe forever. He may rejoice in perfect hope, and never fear hell.

That is not to say that there is no such thing as apostasy, as I remind readers below with a couple old essays.

So You Received Jesus Into Your Heart? So Have Many Apostates (July 16, 2006)

Evil makes cynics of us.

I know it has made one of me in an area that can be nearly fatal to a preacher: conversion. I call people to faith in Christ. It is what I do, and I am convinced that I would be disobedient to do anything else.

So why don't I get all excited about "decisions for Christ"? Because experience keeps teaching me the fragile and untrustworthy nature of such decisions. I trust Jesus, but I do not necessarily trust the steadfastness of those who say they have received him.

Here's a short list of those who have eroded my faith in people's ability to persevere: Charles Templeton, evangelist colleague of Billy Graham, became an outspoken atheist. Roy Clements, once one of England's most respected evangelical ministers, is now living with a homosexual lover. The minister who conducted my wedding also left his wife and announced that he is gay. I know two Wycliffe missionaries - one of whom translated the New Testament into a Colombian indigenous language - who left their wives and the Lord. Enrique, my Arhuaco Scripture co-translator (about whose faith I once wrote glowing tributes), walked away from Christ. My ex wife, who once dedicated her life to missionary service and who encouraged me to enter the ministry, is now a cold-blooded apostate.

And time would fail me to list all the people I know who once received Jesus but who now live such reprobate lives that no one would ever guess they were once people of faith.

I have been fooled so many times by so many people that I am forced to acknowledge the hard truth that I cannot tell who will persevere in the Lord and who will not. If Charles Templeton can fool Billy Graham, and Wycliffe missionaries can fool their colleagues in Colombia and Brazil, and Roy Clements can fool the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and my wife can fool me, then who can't be fooled by whom?

That which I have learned about the heart's inconstancy is what keeps me from saying to any new convert, "You have just been saved eternally - welcome to the family of God!" These "words of comfort" are actually a prophecy that is both arrogant and naïve. Only God knows who will persevere and who will not. I know no one with access to that foreknowledge.

That is why I preach perseverance so much more than I do conversion. I don't care any more how you started - I care how you end up. Just as St. James said, "You believe that there is one God? Great - even the demons believe that," so I might say, "You received Jesus into your heart? Great - so did Larry Flynt." (The publisher of Hustler Magazine was briefly "born again" in the '70s.) The mere decision to follow Christ really puts you on no better spiritual footing than that of Judas Iscariot. He decided to follow Christ too - for a while.

Excuse my cynicism. Of course I know there are legitimate conversions, and I know that I must not let grief over false brothers spoil my joy over true ones. But just as we must take our sufferings and let them make us patient, so we must take our disappointments and let them make us wise. Here is wisdom: something is begun, but nothing settled, when a man says, "I have received Christ." From that point forward we must preach perseverance both to him and to ourselves until on our deathbeds we can truthfully say, "I have fought the good fight, I have run the race, I have kept the faith." Then into God's hands we may commend our spirits.

Loss Of Salvation (September 24, 2006)

"Can someone lose his salvation?"

I was asked this the other day. I've been asked it before, and will be asked it again. It seemed good to write out a response.

I have come to believe that the key word in that question is the word "someone". Who exactly is the "someone" whose security of salvation we are questioning? Presumably "someone" here is understood to be "someone who believes in Jesus." But clarification is needed. Do we mean someone who believes in Jesus with living faith or dead faith? James distinguishes the two in James 2:14-17:

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

James says that faith without action is dead, and when he asks the rhetorical question, "Can such faith save him?" the answer is no. Even demons have dead faith, according to verse 19 of that chapter. And they're damned. (See Jude 6.)

So now the question is, "Can someone who believes in Jesus with living faith lose his salvation?"

I have one more thing to clarify first. By "believe" do we mean believe permanently or temporarily? For example, when Paul told the Philippian jailer, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31), suppose the jailer had asked, "How long do I have to believe before I can go back to my pagan religion?" Would Paul would have given him a safe time period? Believe in Jesus a day or two, or a month, maybe 10 years - and that ought to do it? Or was it understood that the man was being called to permanent faith?

I don't think it is debatable that this, and all biblical invitations to believe in Christ, are invitations to believe in him permanently. What is debated, though, is whether it is possible to believe in him temporarily. Frankly it bothers me this is considered controversial, since Jesus spoke directly to the issue in Luke 8:13 in the parable of the sower and the seeds: "Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away." Any who think it is impossible to "believe for a while" are met with a Scriptural rebuke in the plain words of Christ.

Now I feel that the question we started with is answerable. "Can someone who believes permanently in Jesus with living faith lose his salvation?" Absolutely not. All such people are children of God and eternally secure. Nothing can separate them from the love of Christ (Romans 8:35-39). They hear the voice of Jesus, follow him, receive from him eternal life, and nothing can take them out of his hand. (John 10:27-28).

Pastor's Page: December 30, 2008

"They Take Away People's Minds"

Years ago my brother Dave told me he read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian concurrently with C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and that he would have liked to have seen a debate between those two. "Lewis would have destroyed Russell," he said.

Recently I read Russell's essay myself and found that my brother under-spoke. Why I Am Not A Christian strikes me as the work of a child. Granted, a very witty and smart-mouthed child - but a child nonetheless. Before reading it I assumed that the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and standard-bearer of 20th century atheism would at least be a worthy opponent for Lewis, and that bringing these two minds into dialogue would be a stimulating exercise. But it is not so. A "debate" between Lewis and Russell would have had all the sizzle of a grown-up corralling a boy who is just playing verbal "Gotcha!" and changing the subject every two minutes. Russell's colleague Alfred North Whitehead knew whereof he spoke when he told students at Harvard, "Bertie [Russell]...is simple-minded."

Two examples of what I mean:

Russell understands the "First Cause" argument to mean that everything has a cause, and notes, "If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause" (I heard Richard Dawkins make the same mistake in his debate with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, asking rhetorically: "If God made everything, who made God?"). But this point involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from causation! No theistic philosopher would be so stupid as to claim that everything has a cause; what has frequently been claimed (and I believe justly) is that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The distinction between existing and beginning to exist is what the causation debate is all about! Russell's sleight-of-hand at this point is breath-taking, since later in the same paragraph he simply assumes an atheistic answer to the beginning-to-exist question without ever having noted (or noting himself?) that he has moved the debate onto different ground.

That which is truly eternal, which has no beginning, need not - and, I would argue, cannot - have a cause. The interesting question then, the one on which the whole debate turns, is whether the universe is eternal. I believe there are good reasons for believing it is not. (For an excellent discussion on this matter, please read chapter 5 of Lee Strobel's "The Case For Creator", an interview with philosopher William Lane Craig.) But even if the universe were eternal in the only sense it could be - extending backward in time through an infinite succession of moments - it would still not have the kind of eternality which theists have traditionally claimed for God. God has been understood to be eternal in the sense of having existence outside of time, with "time", like "space", merely being things he might choose to enter or exit as a man would his own house. (Christians in fact understand that this is precisely what he did in the incarnation and ascension of Christ.)

Russell is playing a child's game when he asks, "If God made everything, who made God?". That is a question I first heard as a young teenager, along with, "If God is all-powerful, could he make a stone so big he couldn't move it?". Such questions did not impress me as profound even then, when I knew very little and had not read anything. They're barely worth the intellectual effort required to dismiss them.

A second example concerns one of Russell's attacks on Christian morality. He writes, "Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life.' And no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children." Russell calls this a "fiendish cruelty", one example among many of the ways the Church inflicts suffering on people.

Wait a minute. First of all, I personally do not undertake to defend any Catholic dogma that conflicts with Scripture, and Russell's attempts to condemn Christian faith because aberrant Romanist practices have attached themselves to it like leeches is simply illegitimate. Russell's point might better be made in an essay titled "Why I Am Not A Catholic" rather than "Why I Am Not A Christian".

Second, Jesus explicitly taught that divorce was permissible in the case of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9). A woman may freely divorce her adulterous husband - even as Joseph nearly divorced Mary on the suspicion of unfaithfulness (Matthew 1:18-19). If Russell had thought about it for two seconds, he would have seen that he actually agrees with biblical policy, and that what he finds cruel is Catholic repudiation of it!

Third, all brands of Christian faith teach faithfulness and chastity. It is not through following the Church's moral teaching that a man becomes syphilitic, but through rejecting it. If, on the other hand, a man adopted Russell's moral code and personal example, he might indeed become as syphilitic as Nietzsche (who died deranged of the disease), and give that wasting illness to his wife and kids too. The problem here is not with Christians who obey the Church's teaching, but with people - Christian or not - who defy it.

The intellectual poverty of Russell's essay puts me in mind of something my son Ben said when he was just three years old. It remains perhaps the one truly mystical experience of my life. When we were living in Colombia my wife and I took Ben to the beach one night to see a dance performance. We thought he would enjoy the spectacle of a bonfire and drums and energy and movement. As the first dance played out, it dawned on me that what we were watching was a reenactment of a frenzied pagan ritual. (The dancers had dressed as Chimila Indians; one character in a mask portrayed the devil who was tied up by others and then released.) Neither my wife nor I said anything, but when the dance ended, Ben said quietly, "They take away people's minds." We stared at our little boy and asked, "What did you say Ben?" and he repeated, in a small voice, "They take away people's minds."

We left immediately. Ben said nothing else, and we questioned him no further. But I felt that I had grasped the import of what was actually a prophetic statement - a word from God, if you will - and have reflected on it many times since. To "take away people's minds" is the work of demons. The forces arrayed against God have, as one of their goals, the corruption of human intellect. Though they may leave intact the IQ, and memory, and faculties of expression, they hinder the mind's ability to think rationally, and leave vacuous space where otherwise a mind might work to perceive spiritual truth and awaken to God.

I do not think that demons can do this to us without our permission, which we grant by sinning. I have known several former Christians who became "Russellitic" in their thoughts, and, for every last one of them, the loss of faith was preceded by (or at least accompanied by) obvious personal sin. The correlation in my experience is 100% exact, and I do not regard it as coincidental. I have seen the correlation work the other way too. In discussing his reluctant conversion from atheism to Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, "[I]t is significant that this...happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience." (in C. S. Lewis: Christian Reflections: "The Seeing Eye"). Submission to conscience brightens the mind, even as rebellion against it summons intellectual darkness.

In John 7:17 Jesus laid down a gauntlet challenge to any who might question whether he was speaking for God or blowing smoke out his ears. It was simple: do good. "If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." The best preparation for contemplating ultimate truth, including the weighing of the claims of Christ, is to behave well. Do good. Submit humbly to the voice of conscience and divine authority, and watch where your thoughts go.

Or sin, and, apart from God's grace, you will manage to find verbal mush persuasive. Russell himself is the best example. He was an utterly despicable human being, a would-be genocidal maniac (see my November 18 essay) and serial cheater so enslaved to the urges of his genitalia that T. S. Eliot labeled him "Priapus in the shrubbery." (And that was before Russell seduced Eliot's wife!). If you go in that direction, abandoning your morals to the self-serving call of fallen human nature and despising the voice of duty, conscience and law, you risk having your mind taken away, and philosophical rubbish of the sort that Russell spouted may start making sense to you.

Pastor's Page: December 16, 2008

What Would Abraham Do?

Recently I read a broadside against biblical faith that focused on the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac. The author wrote, "What was Abraham thinking?...[He] receives the instruction to kill his son. But wouldn't he be mad simply to go ahead and do so?...It might not be God talking, but the devil; Abraham might be mad; the test might be to see if he refuses. All three of these possibilities seem more plausible than the idea that God wants his son dead, since what kind of loving God would command such a barbaric act?"

Researching the matter I found another writer who said: "Abraham is nothing less than that person who unthinkingly says 'Yes, Lord' when told to murder another human being...[H]ow can we possibly feel anything but horror at what he was prepared to do? Here is a man who was prepared to murder his own child,... - and this is the example which the Bible holds up as praiseworthy. Think about it: Nowadays, any parent who claimed she killed her child because God told her to would be thrown into jail, or into a mental institution...I challenge anybody to find one person who would hear about it and exclaim, 'Wow, I wish I had that much faith!'"

I think these writers make a good point. If any man today killed his son (or tried to) because God commanded it, we would not praise his faith but execute him or lock him up. And this isn't merely a hypothetical mental exercise - many people have indeed murdered family members for just such religious reasons. Jon Krakauer's amazing book Under The Banner Of Heaven tells riveting stories of Mormon Fundamentalists who killed because God told them to. And remember that poor psycho Andrea Yates? In 2001 she drowned her five kids because she thought that was what God wanted.

So, was Abraham a psychopath for believing that the voice in his head saying, "Gut and bleed Isaac for me" was the Lord's? And are Christians inconsistent for exalting him as a man of faith while imprisoning, executing or confining to mental institutions those who act upon the same instruction? Can we praise Father Abraham, but run and call the police when some parent starts wearing a WWAD bracelet?

I have a thought that I'd like to throw into the discussion. It seems to me that the disgust about Abraham and the voice-in-his-head-that-claimed-to-be-God fails to take into account the religious context of Abraham's day. Abraham was born into raw paganism and knew practically nothingabout God. Joshua 24:2 says that his father worshiped other gods. Abraham came to theology "green," we might say, with no Bible to read and no church or synagogue to attend. He not only lived before Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, but before Moses and the 10 commandments. His template for understanding the supernatural would have been the pagan religions around him, and the gods of those faith communities - the Chemoshes and Molechs and Ashterahs - often demanded child sacrifice from the truly devout.

I don't believe that Abraham understood at first that the supernatural being who spoke in his ear and promised him good things was necessarily all that different from Molech. In fact, I see no convincing evidence that Abraham was even a monotheist! When did the Lord ever tell him that there were no other gods? Abraham only worshiped and served the Lord God, but that does not mean he necessarily disbelieved the existence of others.

So part of Abraham's theological education had to involve unlearning some of the elementary things he thought he knew about "gods and their behavior." And I believe that much of the significance of the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac is lost if we don't understand that God was at this point distinguishing himself from the gods of Abraham's acquaintance. We who occupy this spot on the timeline of revelation history don't need this lesson, because we know God - or should know him - well enough for something as simple as that. But from Abraham's perspective, it would have been a simple truism locked in his bones that all gods demanded blood somehow, even human blood. And when the order came to sacrifice his son, I suppose he was disheartened but not terribly surprised by it. "Oh. Of course. I might have known. So that's what you're like."

But that isn't what God is like. Molech may have been pleased with the smell of burning infant flesh, but not the God who spoke in the ear of Abraham. After proving (or, rather, after having Abraham prove to himself and to us) that he was no less devoted to God than pagans were to their demons, God provided a substitute. A ram sufficed/ As sacrifice/ To self-appease/ The great I Am. In this instance Abraham learned at least a couple things: (1) His God was much nicer than Molech, and (2) His God was nonetheless no softie. Just because he was good did not mean he had less of a claim to ultimate devotion from Abraham than the demon gods had from their worshipers.

While I believe the story of Abraham nearly killing Isaac makes sense in its context, it is still incomplete until you get to the New Testament. There God himself endures the torment he spared Abraham, giving up his Son - with no last-minute substitute, and it wasn't mercifully quick - so that sinners could live. In comparing the stories of Isaac's near-death experience with Jesus' crucifixion, we come to learn, and love, the shocking truth that God is kinder to us than he is to himself.

I think I can safely compare the revulsion that skeptics feel over Abraham's action with Isaac to the aesthetic revulsion we would all feel over examining just a square millimeter of a beautiful woman's face. I suppose you could press your eye up to a magnifying glass about an inch away from her skin, but no one is pretty at that distance. You must back up and take in the context. Take in the context of Abraham's religious environment, and also the great work that God would do 2,000 years later, and then you can appreciate the beauty of the whole.

And as for any evil psycho who claims today to murder at the command of God - "just like Abraham!" - I think the rebuff comes easily enough. "Oh no. We've known for 4,000 years now that God isn't like that. And even granting that he commanded Abraham to kill Isaac - in circumstances that do not hold today, and that foreshadowed the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ - don't forget that God provided a substitute ram that day, and that, in the end, Abraham never killed anybody."

Pastor's Page: December 9, 2008

Bank Error In Your Favor - Collect $200.

In his book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten, Julian Baggini writes up and comments on "100 experiments for the armchair philosopher." Many of the thought experiments involve ethical quandaries. For example:
Richard went to an ATM to withdraw 100 (British) pounds from his account and received 10,000 pounds by mistake. Certain that the bank would catch the error, he put the loot away and waited. But after a couple months and no word from the bank, he took the money and went to put a hefty down-payment on a new luxury car. "On the way, however, he did feel a twinge of guilt. Wasn't this stealing? He quickly managed to convince himself it was no such thing. He had not deliberately taken the money, it had just been given to him...No, this wasn't theft. It was just the biggest stroke of luck he had ever had."
Baggini invites the reader to do some moral reasoning about Richard's actions. He notes, "In real life..., we might expect an honest person [to notify the bank]. But how many people would? Not that many, I'd guess."
Some would. I know someone who did. About 30 years ago, Baggini's hypothetical scenario actually happened to my parents. Even the numbers were the same, though the amount was in dollars rather than pounds. My mother deposited $100 in the family checking account and later found out that the bank had recorded it as $10,000. They had apparently left out the decimal point between dollars and cents.
So mom immediately notified them of the error. (In her letter she playfully suggested, "Of course, if it is too much trouble for you to adjust your records, we will gladly adjust ours!") The bank quickly corrected the mistake - though without thanking my mother for bringing it to their attention - and $9,900 that my parents could have made prudent use of was carried away by that steady-blowing wind of moral integrity that characterized their lives.
As I look back on it now, one of the early signs that I was marrying into a family of very different moral outlook was when my father-in-law-to-be told me about the time a teller made a huge error in his favor when he was cashing in some bonds - and boy did he walk away with a chunk of change! I hardly knew what to say. I didn't tell him my mother's story. Some years later, though, it made sense when my (now ex-) wife came home with a pair of jeans that a checkout clerk neglected to ring up, and I was the one who trudged back to the mall to pay for them.
Be scrupulously honest all the time. It is wrong to take advantage of correctable mistakes made in your favor. Any follower of Christ should know this instinctively, live accordingly, and train his children to do the same.

Pastor's Page: December 2, 2008

Dropping Off Your Kid In Nebraska

Outrage greeted the news that parents were abandoning their older kids at Nebraska hospitals this fall. A safe-haven policy designed for newborns actually set the age limit at 18, so instead of getting day-old babies from panicked young moms, hospitals started receiving teenage kids from parents in their 40s. Who could imagine a parent so evil? What mom or dad would just dump their kid like that?
Then we started hearing about some of the kids.
Melyssa Cowburn's 5-year-old "tried to bash in a baby's head with a hammer. Then he set the shower curtain on fire. The next day he plugged all the sinks and toilets in their apartment and flooded the place." (Chicago Tribune 11/21/08). This child was the offspring of a crack addict who had abandoned him when he was 16 months old. Melissa became his guardian and decided, "I'm going to love this little guy and it's just going to make everything better." Right. Despite Melyssa and her husband's loving efforts, the child remained a violent screaming monster who constantly got expelled from day-care programs. Melyssa tried everything - even a drug overdose to end her own life - but nothing worked. She drove him to Omaha, said good-bye, and cried herself all the way back home to Washington state.
Parents of older devils have feared, with good reason, that their sons would kill them in their sleep or rape their daughters. What would you do with such a son? I could see myself handcuffing him and throwing him in the trunk of my car and speeding westward on the I-80. I say "I could see myself" doing this because there's no reason it couldn't have happened to me, good parent though I am. Years ago a missionary friend told me, "My wife and I had three good kids and always thought that parents whose kids were out-of-control just didn't know how to raise them. Then we had our fourth...". He didn't even finish the sentence. The fourth was a candidate for a Nebraska hospital drop-off.
The Bible teaches that there is such a thing as evil you can't fix. I hope this provides some comfort - cold comfort, a "quantum of solace" - to parents of really bad kids. Scripture shows no naivete about the wickedness that can be bound up in the heart of a child. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 told ancient Israelites what to do with their chronically bad kids in a policy so fierce it makes Nebraska abandonment look like treacly indulgence:
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard." Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.
No, I don't think we should kill bad kids. Even rabbinic tradition holds that the death sentence above was never actually carried out. (But what a powerful deterrent! Israelite parents never needed to tell their hellions that the boogey-man would get them: they could just point to the sacred scroll and say, "Listen, numb-nut. Me and the elders are going to pelt you with rocks.")
The larger point though should not be missed: some kids (like some grownups) are just bad, and the strongest measures must be taken concerning them - not necessarily for their rehabilitation (who knows if that is possible?), but simply for the protection and sanity of those around them. Such cases provide the more fortunate among us, the ones who have decent kids, with opportunities to extend the mercy of God to longsuffering parents, and judge them not, lest we be judged.