Loving, Fearing

I was glad that God (I thought) had opened the door to something that I wanted very much – something I almost ached for, something I prayed for. In a very short time, with confusion, I’ve given up on it in fear of the Lord. The fear is real.

I’m flawed, and my understanding of the Lord is flawed, and no doubt that’s where the confusion comes from. But the only course that I can take is the one that, rightly or wrongly, I think that I should take.

But at least an essay sprouts in the ashes.

1. Everybody needs a Zipporah.

Maybe Moses was so crazy-in-love with his sons that he couldn’t bear to inflict the pain of circumcision on them. So on his way back to Egypt, God tried to kill him. Zipporah his wife saved Moses by circumcising his son and touching the foreskin to Moses’s "feet" (a euphemism for genitals). She said, "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" (Exodus 4:25 (NRSV).) God left Moses alone then.

2. Touched by an angel, almost.

Baalam son of Beor, a prophet of God, was on his way to the Moabite king. The king had summoned him to curse Israel, so that the Moabites might defeat them in battle. An angel stood in Baalam’s path, ready to kill him. He could not see the angel, but his donkey could. The donkey balked three times, and Baalam beat it twice and made it go forward. The third time the donkey balked, it couldn’t go to the left or right, because the angel of the Lord stood in a narrow place with his sword drawn. So the donkey sat down under Baalam.

Baalam beat the donkey with his staff, and donkey spoke to him. Then Baalam looked and saw the angel. It terrified him, and he lived. But later he helped Israel’s enemies against the Israelites. Maybe his new donkey was less glib. He was killed by the Israelites while he was among the Midianites.

The most frightening part of this strange story is that before his near-fatal trip to join the Moabites, Baalam refused to go with them; but when they importuned, he consulted God, and God told him to go. Yet God was angry that he went. (Numbers 22.)

3. A place of threshing.

King David angered the Lord by conducting a census of the military-aged men of Israel and Judah. God sent a destroying angel against David’s kingdom. The angel killed 70,000. David saw the angel as it stood above the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. (2 Samuel 24.) (In the parallel account in1 Chronicles, the threshing floor belongs to Ornan the Jebusite.)

The angel stood with his sword stretched over Jerusalem. David feared the angel. Instructed by the angel, he built an alter on the threshing floor and sacrificed to the Lord. Then the Lord told the angel to sheath his sword. It was there that Solomon built the temple of the Lord.

This story in 2 Samuel 24 begins, "Again, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying ‘Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.’" (NRSV) 1 Chronicles 21 begins, "Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel." (1 Chronicles 21:1 (NRSV).)

4. A place of sifting.

After the last supper, before he went to the Mount of Olives, where he was arrested, Jesus said to his disciple, "Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers." (Luke 22:31 (NRSV).) The metaphor "sift all of you like wheat" is interesting when you remember that God stayed his destroying angel on the threshing floor of Araunah (or Ornan).

5. Love or fear?

Should we fear God or love him? The Bible says both. "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28 (NRSV).) "‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment." (Matthew 22:37-38 (NRSV).)

To say that we should fear God makes me feel spiritually primitive compared to my friends who walk only in the love of their loving father. It does. I’m told that the most frequent phrase in the Bible is "fear not". I trust that’s true. But it also feels weird to want to apologize for saying that it’s right to do what the Bible says, and the Bible plainly says, "Fear the Lord."

We might think that it’s one or the other, but we can hold both thoughts. That’s possible if we think of a destroying angel in our path, with his sword drawn, and his eyes on our necks. And God holding him back. We love God for his protection; we fear him for the possibility that he might withdraw that protection.

It’s possible if we think of Satan demanding to beat us like stalks of wheat and to toss us into the air, to blow away like chaff. We love Jesus for praying for us, but we fear that he won’t.

6. Primitive.

Still, some people reject the idea of fearing God as a primitive idea for primitive people who cling to a primitive form of Christianity. A highly-regarded seminary professor said vehemently that God is always for us.

That was many years ago. The professor and I happened to be interested in the same woman. I had no business chasing her, because I was not her equal; he had no business, either, because he was married. He once asked me if I was being "good", and it seemed to be a taunt.

The right answer would have been "Yes" and "No", but if I had answered him I would have said "Yes" and believed it. And if he had asked me if I feared God, I don’t know what I would have said, but the truthful answer would have been "No". Two decades later, after what I think was my flight from my duty to God, after mental illness, and after several attempts to kill myself, I have learned to fear God.

Maybe it’s plausible to say that fear is a primitive response to God. But I needed it for the primitive part of me, and I still do. "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." (NRSV.)  Our spirits love; we need fear of the Lord to keep our flesh from overwhelming our spirits.

7. And yet.

But it has to be fear and love.

Since my time of madness, I’ve been exasperated because it seems that people take God’s mercy for granted. After my hope was restored, I labored to do right, to live up to the professor’s taunt, to be good. (I’ve mentioned the professor twice. Bless him. I was acquainted with him maybe two decades ago; I have no idea who he is today, and he may be a very good man. He was a good man then, at least in part, like me.)

Early Sunday morning a few weeks ago, I thought that God wanted me to go to both the early and the late services at my church. I thought that was crazy, and that the pastor would see me sitting in both services and think that I was a tool. And I didn’t know for sure that I was getting guidance, and I didn’t know for sure that it was from God. I decided to go to the early service, and then to pray about whether to stay for the second service. Based on what happened later, I think that God was behind this.

The sermon was about the grace of God. I didn’t like that; as I listened I mentally thumbed through my ideas about obedience being the important lesson for the comfortable in our time.

The sermon arose out of the pastor’s experience with watching sailboats on a lake in a park. The metaphor described how the boaters succeeded least who tacked straight into the wind. And it seemed plausible that God really had spoken to him in his place of need in that park. But as I listened, I realized that the sermon touched me, too, in my place of need.

Of course, the sermon was mostly the same in both services. But here’s the thing about the first service, the service that normally I don’t go to. Afterward, an elderly woman came up to me. She asked me if I was Ian that she knew from swimming at a certain pool in Riverside. I told her that in some ways she was right, because Ian is a variant of the name Jon, and I was a swimmer, but I was not the man she knew.

I felt affection for her, so I asked her name. It was Grace.

8. Summing up.

I hope I’ve learned not to bet against the mercy of God, but not to take his mercy for granted. Maybe to love God and to fear him is another way to say that.

9. Prayer (by John Newton).

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
and grace my fears relieved;
how precious did that grace appear
the hour I first believed.

Does God Have an Immigration Policy?

"Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?" – Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

We have a disconnect between how we judge others, and how we hope God will judge us.

1. The never-ending debate.

I have friendly debates with friends about illegal immigrants. From my point of view, people have assumptions about illegal immigration, and these assumptions don’t hold up. For example, people assume that there are a limited number of jobs, so that every job taken by an illegal immigrant is a job lost to a citizen.

This assumption doesn’t hold up when it’s studied by economists. Economists find that illegal immigrants create as many jobs as they take. Money doesn't go to illegal immigrants and stop. They spend it. That spending creates jobs. So illegal immigrants don’t just eat the pie; they make more pies. They make pies as fast as they eat them.              .

So I don't think that the facts are on the side of my debate partners. But sooner or later in my friendly debates, the argument becomes a moral argument. Sooner or later, my friends resort to this argument: people shouldn’t come to the country and break the law. And by coming to the country, illegal immigrants are breaking the law.

It’s a fine argument. After all, people should obey the law. Who can endorse law-breaking?

Who wants to be on the side of law-breakers?

2. God and grace.

Well, Jesus.

Yeah, him.

The guy who said:

But go and learn what this means: "I desire compassion, and not sacrifice," for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. [Matthew 9:13; NASB.]

To know God and to know yourself is to know that "[B]y grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast." (Ephesians 2:7-9; NASB).

We need grace when we stand before God so that our own too-scrupulous words don’t return to judge us when we crave mercy. I would not want to be judged by the parable of the slave who’s debt was forgiven by his king, who then threw into prison a debtor who could not pay a debt to him. (Matthew 18:23-35.)

"On Earth as it is in Heaven" means that we must strive to be like Christ.

3. On Earth as it is in Heaven?

That doesn’t mean that we lock up the Penal Code instead of locking up law-breakers. It does mean we pray for the grace to know that we need grace. It does mean we pray for the grace to know when we should confer grace, and when we should withhold it. It does mean we think hard about these things.

When I was a relatively new Christian, I worked at a law firm and had a secretary who undermined me in every way she could. Yet I knew that Christians had to forgive, so I tried and tried to forgive her and to return good for evil. All I ever got back was evil. I finally decided that if it was alright with God for me to hold that job, it was alright with God for me to try to get that secretary fired. Which I did. That is, I tried. In fact, she wasn’t fired until the day I quit the firm.

The point is that I know that it’s hard to model God’s grace; sometimes, it’s impossible. For me, that’s true.

But it’s more possible than a lot of people think.

At the very least, we should not necessarily demand strict obedience to laws, when no harm actually is being done. We should understand that judging others in legalistic strictness is not the righteous, unanswerable argument that it seems to be.

4. Obama, immigration, and grace.

The Obama administration is coming under predictable attack for extending grace to good kids – kids who came to the country illegally as children, who have stayed out of trouble, who want to go to college or join the military. The Obama administration has decided not to bring deportation proceedings against these good kids. Instead, the Obama administration wants to use more resources to eject illegal immigrants who commit crimes and harm our country.

I think that’s a sensible policy. I’m proud of the president for it.

I prefer the president’s plan to the attitude of my friends.

5. My hypocrisy.

But I’m a hypocrite. I pretend to be gracious, but I’m not, because I judge my friends. I act like they are hypocrites, who rely upon grace but are not gracious. Well, they are human, so that’s probably true. But it’s true of me, too, every day.

Maybe they just calibrate grace differently than I do.

But that’s the debate: it’s not law-breaking versus not-law-breaking. It’s lawbreakers learning by grace how much law-breaking we should tolerate, especially when that lawbreaking does no harm.

And it’s knowing that we're not born citizens of Heaven. We don’t earn citizenship. If we enter Heaven, we enter by grace, and by grace alone.

____________________________________

The Obama Administration policy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19immig.html?scp=2&sq=illegal%20immigrants&st=cse

A paper on the net effects of illegal immigration:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2010/09_immigration_greenstone_looney/09_immigration.pdf

God, Madness, and Me

Madness changed the way I see myself and the way I see God.

Madness for me was foraging in dumpsters and looking for places to sleep out of the wind. (Orange groves are bad.  Bushes next to freeways are good.)  It was disembodied voices and a terrible vision. It was lying strapped to a gurney, howling while a hospital staff-member taunted me. It was hard, degrading, and scary.

I’m well now.

I won’t tell much about my life as a homeless lunatic. Not now, at least. Truth is, before today I've told this story to few people, and I've told the whole story to nobody. I worry that people will look down on me.

But if I keep the larger part of the story to myself, I will at least tell you a truth of its effect. This trauma led me to reject some beliefs that I shared with most American Christians. It fundamentally changed my cozy, easy ideas about God. It shifted the earth under me, and it cleared my mind.

My madness did not draw me closer to God. It did sharpen my belief in him. I know that he exists like I know the lines in my hand. But my experience was the opposite of rapture. It brought me no joy.  It deepened me; it sobered me.

My Christianity was not cursory before my madness. I was a long-time churchgoer. I was a deacon at my Presbyterian church. I tithed. I took courses at a theological seminary in Pasadena. I left a career as a public prosecutor to travel to China, where, under an American Christian-service organization, I taught law at Chinese colleges and universities. I spent years absorbing scripture daily, sometimes for hours. I had read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation several times in several translations.

After my madness, I lost my hunger for scripture. Lately, the Bible has seized my attention again. I don’t know where this inspiration comes from, but I welcome it.

I haven’t gone without biblical musings in the years between my trauma and now. Based upon years of study, I could draw upon a pool of knowledge. These musings confirmed an accord between the Bible and what I learned from my season of madness. I believe that still as I test my beliefs by studying the Word.

The Spanish painter Francisco Goya became deaf.  After his deafness, he produced paintings that were literally and emotionally dark, even monstrous.  My theology after my madness became dark like Goya's paintings after his deafness. 

From this dark place, I see a tidal wave coming.  It's like madness taught me to reckon water that pulls back to sea that foretells a destructive wave to come.  I worry for people, that they don't see this, that they don't talk about it, that they don't take steps to live and not to die.

Instead, I sense that America makes happy-talk about God and salvation.  We are an optimistic people, and our theology is optimistic: God is kind, salvation is easy, and Hell is a place for people worse than us.  Our material comfort fools us into a false sense of a benign universe and a tolerant God.  God is tolerant, but only to a point.

This is because the stakes are supremely high.  We want the world to be a pleasure boat, but it's a liberty ship trying to take us to safety through a sea filled with a dangerous enemy that seeks our harm.  A liberty ship demands sterner discipline that a cruise ship.

So I speak out to warn. I feel like the ancient mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. He started on a voyage that seemed at first ordinary. But he and his fellow seamen were swept to a far-away, harsh sea. He sinned grievously. All died on this supernatural voyage but the mariner. He returned to the living to tell his sobering tale. It’s not a perfect simile, but like the "grey beard loon" of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I think my journey gives me something important to tell. I have done this a little in past posts, and I plan to do it more in the future.

And yet:

Come now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into this city, and spend a year there, and trade, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For ye are a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that. [James 4:13-15.]

Still, these are my plans.

Christians, Nut Up.

We Christians are wont to hiss like punctured air hoses when we are criticized by outsiders. We cast a baleful eye at celebrated mockers like Bill Mahar, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. We resent films like Religulous and books like The God Delusion and God is Not Great. Books and films like these make us ache for the quick return of the Lord, so that these Christian-mocking miscreants speedily will be separated from their smug sense of superiority. "Amen", we say.

1. Placing the blame.

But these architects of anti-faith have powerful allies. Their allies are us. Jesus said,

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men. [Matthew 5:13 (ASV)]

The simple, sorry truth is that when enemies of faith tread on people of faith, it is because we have lost our saltiness. The would-be debunkers aren’t to blame; we are. When our adversaries tread us under foot, they only prove that Jesus was right.

2. Knowing our natures.

I think this places blame where it belongs. We are soiled. Increasingly, I nod grimly when I think of the biblical prophet Isaiah saying, "I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips . . .." (Isaiah 6:5 (ASV).) Lies are commonplace in our culture, from bottom to top.

And we love our money and our comfort. We live without qualm to the limit of our means, or beyond it. We buy cars big enough to host hockey games in; now that America is retreating from vehicular behemoths, it is not religious restraint that drums retreat, but the high price of gasoline. We squeeze into the pews of churches that assure us that God wants us to be rich.

Our love of money and comfort crowds out our love of God because we are rich.  In America, the rich don’t repose only in Bel Air; compared to people in biblical times, virtually any resident of Colton, California is rich.  And among nations, America is a rich nation. 

Therefore it is dangerous for us to ignore how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven. But we don't worry; we clamber upon our camels and amble toward the eye of the needle that stands between us and the kingdom. (Mark 10:25.)

We don't know the Bible as we once did. Instead, we draw our principles from what we put in front of ourselves. We learn ethics from eight seasons of the television series "24", rather than from an equal number of seasons with the Bible.

The Bible instructs that:

[W]hoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me: But whoso shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the sea. [Matthew 18:5-6 (ASV).]

But the Catholic Church had to take costly instruction from secular courts about protecting children in their care. This is only the most dramatic religious scandal in a society that grows accustomed to religious scandals, or accustomed to scandals of the pious.

3. Changing our thinking.

Reckless before chasm-sized topics, I suggest, as a start, three modifications of modern American theology.

First, we need to reevaluate our understanding of God’s grace. We seem to believe that salvation is like buying software online, putting a checkmark in the box next to "I agree". So easy.

Here’s a bleaker simile: we are like diners satiating ourselves at the table of sin, and when the grim reaper presents the tariff, we jerk our thumbs over our shoulders and say, "Give that to that guy over there, dying on the cross."

Theologian Dietrich Bohnhoeffer surveyed the doctrine of grace in his native Germany before the outbreak of World War II. He saw a country like ours, awash in belief in cheap grace. We all know how that turned out then: Christianity in Germany did not resist the war, and it did not resist the mass murder of the Jews.

Bohnhoeffer wrote a study of grace called The Cost of Discipleship. It’s no light read; it requires much time and close attention. But it rewards the reading of it.

Second, we must learn to fear God. This is so biblical that it cries out from the pages of scripture. For example, "[Jehovah] will fulfil the desire of them that fear him; He also will hear their cry and will save them." (Psalms 145:19 (ASV).) And "Jehovah taketh pleasure in them that fear him, In those that hope in his lovingkindness." (Psalms 147:11 (ASV).) And "The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge . . .." (Proverbs 1:7 (ASV).)  And  "[B]e not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28 (ASV).)

Some mornings as I go into the courthouse, I hear lay preachers preaching hellfire and brimstone to the people lined up to go through the metal detectors. I confess, I groan inwardly. This is partly my reaction to the indecency of forcing a biblical harangue upon a captive audience. But it’s also partly that I don’t think that these lay preachers really fear God; they reveal more condescension than love and trembling. Fear of God must be more than lip service; it must be a holy dread.

Third, we would do well to have less confidence in our own salvation. This walks against the wind of popular "assurance of salvation." And yet I find nothing in scripture that establishes assurance of salvation. Instead, I read of a mere remnant of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob returning to their homeland from Babylonian captivity. I read of many disciples abandoning Jesus when he teaches hard things. (John 6:26-66.) I read Matthew 7:21-23:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out demons, and by thy name do many mighty works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. [ASV]

Acts 2:21 superficially seems to contradict Matthew 7:21-23:

And it shall be, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

In light of Acts 2:21, what of those of Matthew 7:22 who prophesied, cast out demons, did mighty works "by thy name", and were not saved? On the day of judgment, they could only say "Lord, Lord" (Matthew 7:22), not the name of the Lord (Acts 2:21). The reconciliation of these two passages is this: not all who claim Jesus in their lives on Earth will be permitted to call on the name of the Lord on the day of judgment.

4. Practicing the spiritual disciplines.

Those are suggestions about how to think about our God and ourselves. What then do we do? This is another mountain, one that I’ll try to scale in two paragraphs.

When a flight attendant gives instructions about emergencies, she tells the passengers to put the oxygen cup over their own air passages before helping other passengers. That’s probably pretty good advice for spiritual growth.

Therefore study. Learn. Grow. This, like almost everything else I have touched on so far, is a huge subject, not exhaustible in a blog post. So I’ll just say where to get direction. Aside from the Bible, I recommend three books. Richard Foster wrote a modern classic called Celebration of Discipline. One great thing about Foster’s book is that he lists other resources. I also recommend Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines. Don Postema’s Space for God is good for group study.

5. Conclusion.

I have said grim things. Maybe I’m a crank. But I urge an antidote to the free, easy, empty Christianity of our time. Who wants to spend a lifetime in church and an eternity apart from God? I fear that too many of us will be mocked in Gehenna for our unfinished towers. (Luke 14:28-30.)

John the Baptist said to the multitudes who came to him to be baptized, "Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Luke 3:7 (ASV).) Forget who warned us; let's be warned.

I started out this post by mentioning our dislike of criticism by professional skeptics and others.  But here is a saying: "Take care of your character, and your reputation will take care of itself."  This should be the Christians' response to our critics.

Note:

I cite books, from the rank to the sublime, in the text. Where I cite a book, I usually provide a link to that book on Amazon.com. I provide the link only for your convenience. If you want the book, great; but it doesn’t matter to me where you get it.