The Burning Scarecrow
There’s something that bothers me. It doesn’t bother me terribly, but I find it a little frustrating. There’s this man, made completely out of straw, who I’m constantly running into. The poor guy is always being set on fire by people I talk to. It’s embarrassing, really. I don’t know why people feel so comfortable to set straw men ablaze right in front of me, but it seems to happen often.
Let me explain a little so you can understand what I mean. The other day I was out with some co-workers. I had a disagreement about something with one of the guys, and his response was as follows: ‘maybe we should all believe in magical beings in the sky.’ That charge was meant to cut off my legs and invalidate whatever meaningless topic we were discussing. He set a straw man ablaze.
In situations like this it’s very difficult to know how to respond. Usually I just throw one hand up to my forehead in a visible display of disbelief. I cannot believe how arrogant and mindless these people are. People have been dismissing Theists for years in this manner. Why? Hasn’t there been enough death in the name of irreligion that they need to bring the poor scarecrow before the flames again?
To end these types of awkward encounters, let me state two things clearly. First of all, belief in a personal power who created the universe is not the same as belief in a fairy, unicorn or magic. Belief that something suddenly appears out of nothing is actually magic. This is possibly the most tragic thing, is to have someone burning a straw man in front of me, and the whole time I know the straw man is their father. Secondly, having not given my reasons for belief in God to you personally, it’s a little arrogant and presumptuous to assume I only believe because that’s what I’ve been taught. You’d have to look me in the eyes to know that, though, which is a little difficult with your nose up in the air.
It’s time for this senseless slaughter of scarecrows to end. It’s time for real, open dialogue. I don’t personally care if you believe in God or not. In order for us to have meaningful discussion, though, you need to stop dressing up arguments, putting my face on them and then setting them ablaze. It really makes it uncomfortably hot for everyone. Straw really burns well.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Lessons of the Sword (II)
Love in the Void
God is love. What a wonderful statement. The fact that we serve a loving God is such a comforting, praiseworthy truth. It’s something that we take solace in during difficult times. Love is such an overwhelming concept that even those outside of the Christian faith recognize its value. All we need is love. Change the world with love. People look for love, desire it. We all understand the great power that love has over our lives, and we also understand our basic need for it.
It’s often said that love fills the void. Unfortunately, in our contemporary, love seems to be in a void. We talk about love all the time, but each of us has a different concept of what that entails. Lately there are a lot of ‘Christians’ talking about how God is love and nothing can overpower that love. His love is blinding, they say, and it’s because of this love that God can forgive sins. This is nothing short of a tragic, erroneous blunder stemming from a misunderstanding of love and the gospel. First of all, love is not the reason God forgives. God forgives because of the atoning death of Christ. Period. There is no other basis for the forgiveness of our sins than the blood of Jesus Christ. Secondly, it seems like these people have forgotten that God has other qualities. Holiness and justice are two that come to mind. Part of the reason that the gospel is so amazing is because justice is meted out. Wrongs are punished and everything in the end is made right. God’s justice demands that sins are punished. Without faith in Christ, one must face that punishment directly. Period.
Outside of this misunderstanding of the love of God, Christians seem to have confusion about how we are supposed to love. Our love is also not in a vacuum. Philippians 1:9-11 gives us some qualities as to how we are to love. In these verses, Paul is giving us a glimpse into how he prays. He prays for the Philippian believers that their love would grow more and more. He wants their love to increase. Notice, though, that he gives some parameters for that love. He tells them the boundaries that their love is to grow within, and he also gives them the reason for their love.
In verse 9, he writes that their ‘love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment.’ These are the boundaries for their love. Their love is not to be some kind of undiscriminating, touchy-feely, warm sentiments towards everything. It is to be bound up in real knowledge and all discernment. Real knowledge indicates that their is a false knowledge. Hence we have the love that is preached today which says that God’s love negates His justice and holiness. Hence we have a false gospel that says God’s love won’t let people to go to hell. The Scriptures, the real knowledge of God, tells us that God’s love still demands justice. In fact, His justice is important because of His love. Nobody wants Hitler’s crimes to go unpunished. Nobody wants serial killers to run free. Nobody wants kidnappers, rapists and sex slave dealers crimes to go unpunished. Nobody except for the kidnappers, rapists and sex slave dealers. People who love the victims of the kidnappers, rapists and sex slave dealers want to see them punished for the awful crimes they have committed. Love demands justice. The knowledge of God tells us this.
Not only is our love to grow in knowledge, but also in discernment. Discernment, as Paul says in verse 10, is being able to ‘approve the things that are excellent.’ That is to say, to choose the things that are more worthy of being loved. To choose goodness. Love is to be discriminatory. We need to be discriminating in our love. This is not to say that we discriminate against people, for Christ has told us to love even our enemies. We are to discriminate against bad choices, bad actions, bad motives. Their are things that we are not to love. We are to hate sin, as God Himself hates sin. Love is not in a void. There are parameters to our love.
There is a purpose for those parameters, though, and Paul tells us those in verse 10. The purpose is that we may be ‘sincere and blameless until the day of Christ.’ The purpose of love is holiness. Love is not an end unto itself. Love is meant to make us like God Himself. The holiness of God is His controlling attribute. While it is true that God is love, the Bible tells us emphatically that God is holy, holy, holy. We are to grow in love so that we will be holy. Period. Love is not some abstract quality that just makes us blind to the gruesome features of sin and helps us forget about the rebellious war that mankind is waging against God. Love is meant to understand the truth and to be discriminatory against evil. Love is meant to accomodate justice and bring about holiness. Love fills the void, to be sure. It fills it with truth and justice.
God is love. What a wonderful statement. The fact that we serve a loving God is such a comforting, praiseworthy truth. It’s something that we take solace in during difficult times. Love is such an overwhelming concept that even those outside of the Christian faith recognize its value. All we need is love. Change the world with love. People look for love, desire it. We all understand the great power that love has over our lives, and we also understand our basic need for it.
It’s often said that love fills the void. Unfortunately, in our contemporary, love seems to be in a void. We talk about love all the time, but each of us has a different concept of what that entails. Lately there are a lot of ‘Christians’ talking about how God is love and nothing can overpower that love. His love is blinding, they say, and it’s because of this love that God can forgive sins. This is nothing short of a tragic, erroneous blunder stemming from a misunderstanding of love and the gospel. First of all, love is not the reason God forgives. God forgives because of the atoning death of Christ. Period. There is no other basis for the forgiveness of our sins than the blood of Jesus Christ. Secondly, it seems like these people have forgotten that God has other qualities. Holiness and justice are two that come to mind. Part of the reason that the gospel is so amazing is because justice is meted out. Wrongs are punished and everything in the end is made right. God’s justice demands that sins are punished. Without faith in Christ, one must face that punishment directly. Period.
Outside of this misunderstanding of the love of God, Christians seem to have confusion about how we are supposed to love. Our love is also not in a vacuum. Philippians 1:9-11 gives us some qualities as to how we are to love. In these verses, Paul is giving us a glimpse into how he prays. He prays for the Philippian believers that their love would grow more and more. He wants their love to increase. Notice, though, that he gives some parameters for that love. He tells them the boundaries that their love is to grow within, and he also gives them the reason for their love.
In verse 9, he writes that their ‘love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment.’ These are the boundaries for their love. Their love is not to be some kind of undiscriminating, touchy-feely, warm sentiments towards everything. It is to be bound up in real knowledge and all discernment. Real knowledge indicates that their is a false knowledge. Hence we have the love that is preached today which says that God’s love negates His justice and holiness. Hence we have a false gospel that says God’s love won’t let people to go to hell. The Scriptures, the real knowledge of God, tells us that God’s love still demands justice. In fact, His justice is important because of His love. Nobody wants Hitler’s crimes to go unpunished. Nobody wants serial killers to run free. Nobody wants kidnappers, rapists and sex slave dealers crimes to go unpunished. Nobody except for the kidnappers, rapists and sex slave dealers. People who love the victims of the kidnappers, rapists and sex slave dealers want to see them punished for the awful crimes they have committed. Love demands justice. The knowledge of God tells us this.
Not only is our love to grow in knowledge, but also in discernment. Discernment, as Paul says in verse 10, is being able to ‘approve the things that are excellent.’ That is to say, to choose the things that are more worthy of being loved. To choose goodness. Love is to be discriminatory. We need to be discriminating in our love. This is not to say that we discriminate against people, for Christ has told us to love even our enemies. We are to discriminate against bad choices, bad actions, bad motives. Their are things that we are not to love. We are to hate sin, as God Himself hates sin. Love is not in a void. There are parameters to our love.
There is a purpose for those parameters, though, and Paul tells us those in verse 10. The purpose is that we may be ‘sincere and blameless until the day of Christ.’ The purpose of love is holiness. Love is not an end unto itself. Love is meant to make us like God Himself. The holiness of God is His controlling attribute. While it is true that God is love, the Bible tells us emphatically that God is holy, holy, holy. We are to grow in love so that we will be holy. Period. Love is not some abstract quality that just makes us blind to the gruesome features of sin and helps us forget about the rebellious war that mankind is waging against God. Love is meant to understand the truth and to be discriminatory against evil. Love is meant to accomodate justice and bring about holiness. Love fills the void, to be sure. It fills it with truth and justice.
A note of apology
To those of you who read this blog regularly (all 3 of you), I'd like to write a note of apology for taking such a long hiatus. I've had a month of transitioning here in March. I've begun 2 new jobs which require a good portion of my time, and my responsibilities at home have also required a little more of a concentrated effort. For these reasons, I've been unable to produce anything this month. I apologize. I will attempt to publish the missing articles from March at a later date. For now, I hope this will suffice.
Monday, February 28, 2011
The Melting Pot (I)
Question About Job
As I laid out earlier in my post titled ‘On Formats,’ I will be using this section of my blog to address questions posed to me by readers, or writing about other miscellaneous subjects. It so happens that I received a question from an anonymous reader regarding the book of Job. I was debating whether or not to address the question, since it comes anonymously and I’m not sure of the spirit the question was asked with. I decided to address the question in this post, because it allows to write on a very important subject.
The question is as follows:
Since you mention Job. I have always found that this passage.. Job 3:16-19...refers to abortion...leaning toward the pro-choice side. Basically meaning that it is better to be aborted than to live a life that is unhappy or filled with negative actions. What are your thoughts? "Or why was I not as a hidden untimely birth, as infants that never see the light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they hear not the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master. Job 3:16-19"
When we approach the Word of God, it’s very important that we remain sensitive to what the Lord is trying to teach us, and to refrain from imposing our views onto the His holy book. The Bible has been used as a text to support all kinds of wrong thinking. Take, for example, the KKK. This hate-filled, racist group claim that the Bible is their authoritative source for truth. They claim that the curse of Ham is definitive proof that black people are inferior to white. My grandfather uses an obscure passage in the book of Isaiah to claim that people who smoke go to hell. There is a cult group here in Korea that claims God is a woman. They make this claim due to the fact that the Hebrew word used for God in the book of Genesis is feminine in form.
The Bible teaches none of these things. The curse of Ham doesn’t result in the superiority of the white man. The verse in Isaiah doesn’t even speak about smoking tobacco. God is clearly revealed as a Father in the Word of God, but not only that He is also revealed as husband, master and other male roles. Jesus Christ was clearly a man. When we read the Bible, we need to remember that it is a book. As such, it is meant to be read as a book. We are not to infuse every word with some kind of special, hidden meaning. We don’t take things that are stated and hold them up as proofs to views that we want to hold. We are called to bend our will and our understanding to God’s; not vice-versa. The reason that all of those examples are wrong extrapolations of what the Word of God actually says is really for two reasons.
First of all we need to take into account what the Bible says as a whole. This is summed up by the phrase ‘let Scripture interpret Scripture.’ If we think a particular verse of Scripture is making a statement that doesn’t agree with the rest of what Scripture says, our understanding of the passage is probably flawed. We need to dig a little deeper and discover what the text means. Take for example, the book of Ecclesiastes. In the book of Ecclesiastes we read Solomon’s reflections on life. Multiple times in this book he says ‘all is vanity.’ The Bible clearly teaches that their is a purpose and meaning to life, and so we wouldn’t take these verses and make the assertion that the Bible teaches life is meaningless. The purpose of the book of Ecclesiastes is to show that life without God is meaningless. At the end of the book, Solomon states this explicitly, and the rest of the book suddenly makes sense. We need to take into account what the Bible as a whole teaches and not just rip out one verse to argue for a viewpoint.
Secondly we need to, as I mentioned earlier, read the Bible as a book. We need to take into account the type of literature each book is and we need to allow the parts of each individual book to be interpreted from the context of that particular book. Taking the example we gave of the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon gave his answer to the meaning of life at the end of his book. The earlier parts of the book are very bleak and without hope; the kinds of things you may read about in a book written by an atheist. The ending of the book serves to put the whole book into context. The earlier parts are the foundation for what Solomon is claiming. I use the book of Ecclesiastes because it is similar to the book of Job. The book of Job contains many statements about reality. At the end of the book, however, we see God’s response to all that has been said earlier. God effectively quiets Job and Job ends up repenting from his earlier statements in dust and ashes.
Taking into account the type of literature that the book of Job is, then, will help us to accurately interpret the book. The book itself is not a didactic book. That is to say, it is not a book meant to teach doctrine. Each statement in Job is not a direct teaching. Instead, the book falls into the category of poetry, and as such contains quite a bit of narrative. That is to say that the book contains a lot of historical record of what people said. A lot of the Bible is actually written in the narrative without commentary about what is right or wrong. Take Genesis 34 for example. This chapter relates the story of how Jacob’s sons brutally slaughtered an entire city of people. There’s no commentary about whether or not what they did is right or wrong. Jacob complains about the anticipated consequences to himself, but there is no statement as to whether they were in the right or in the wrong.
This is what we have in Job. The verses that are cited are a prime example of misinterpretation. In the context of the book itself, this passage is simply relating the sorrow of Job. He was so sorrowful that he wished he were never born, that his mother had miscarried. There is no commentary here as to whether his feelings are right or wrong. The fact that God silenced him later in the book and Job then repented of his earlier statements could be used to say that these statements by Job were sinful. That’s more than I'd like to to say about the passage, though, at least for the purposes of this article. The important thing to remember is that in its context, this passage has no bearing on the abortion issue. The purpose and tenor of the passage is to relate the deep suffering that Job was undergoing. To add anything more to it would be committing a gross error of misinterpretation.
Thank you for your question, and I hope you found my answer helpful (although poorly written). If anyone has any questions they'd like me to address in a blog, feel free to leave a comment for me. Please tell me who you are though!
As I laid out earlier in my post titled ‘On Formats,’ I will be using this section of my blog to address questions posed to me by readers, or writing about other miscellaneous subjects. It so happens that I received a question from an anonymous reader regarding the book of Job. I was debating whether or not to address the question, since it comes anonymously and I’m not sure of the spirit the question was asked with. I decided to address the question in this post, because it allows to write on a very important subject.
The question is as follows:
Since you mention Job. I have always found that this passage.. Job 3:16-19...refers to abortion...leaning toward the pro-choice side. Basically meaning that it is better to be aborted than to live a life that is unhappy or filled with negative actions. What are your thoughts? "Or why was I not as a hidden untimely birth, as infants that never see the light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they hear not the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master. Job 3:16-19"
When we approach the Word of God, it’s very important that we remain sensitive to what the Lord is trying to teach us, and to refrain from imposing our views onto the His holy book. The Bible has been used as a text to support all kinds of wrong thinking. Take, for example, the KKK. This hate-filled, racist group claim that the Bible is their authoritative source for truth. They claim that the curse of Ham is definitive proof that black people are inferior to white. My grandfather uses an obscure passage in the book of Isaiah to claim that people who smoke go to hell. There is a cult group here in Korea that claims God is a woman. They make this claim due to the fact that the Hebrew word used for God in the book of Genesis is feminine in form.
The Bible teaches none of these things. The curse of Ham doesn’t result in the superiority of the white man. The verse in Isaiah doesn’t even speak about smoking tobacco. God is clearly revealed as a Father in the Word of God, but not only that He is also revealed as husband, master and other male roles. Jesus Christ was clearly a man. When we read the Bible, we need to remember that it is a book. As such, it is meant to be read as a book. We are not to infuse every word with some kind of special, hidden meaning. We don’t take things that are stated and hold them up as proofs to views that we want to hold. We are called to bend our will and our understanding to God’s; not vice-versa. The reason that all of those examples are wrong extrapolations of what the Word of God actually says is really for two reasons.
First of all we need to take into account what the Bible says as a whole. This is summed up by the phrase ‘let Scripture interpret Scripture.’ If we think a particular verse of Scripture is making a statement that doesn’t agree with the rest of what Scripture says, our understanding of the passage is probably flawed. We need to dig a little deeper and discover what the text means. Take for example, the book of Ecclesiastes. In the book of Ecclesiastes we read Solomon’s reflections on life. Multiple times in this book he says ‘all is vanity.’ The Bible clearly teaches that their is a purpose and meaning to life, and so we wouldn’t take these verses and make the assertion that the Bible teaches life is meaningless. The purpose of the book of Ecclesiastes is to show that life without God is meaningless. At the end of the book, Solomon states this explicitly, and the rest of the book suddenly makes sense. We need to take into account what the Bible as a whole teaches and not just rip out one verse to argue for a viewpoint.
Secondly we need to, as I mentioned earlier, read the Bible as a book. We need to take into account the type of literature each book is and we need to allow the parts of each individual book to be interpreted from the context of that particular book. Taking the example we gave of the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon gave his answer to the meaning of life at the end of his book. The earlier parts of the book are very bleak and without hope; the kinds of things you may read about in a book written by an atheist. The ending of the book serves to put the whole book into context. The earlier parts are the foundation for what Solomon is claiming. I use the book of Ecclesiastes because it is similar to the book of Job. The book of Job contains many statements about reality. At the end of the book, however, we see God’s response to all that has been said earlier. God effectively quiets Job and Job ends up repenting from his earlier statements in dust and ashes.
Taking into account the type of literature that the book of Job is, then, will help us to accurately interpret the book. The book itself is not a didactic book. That is to say, it is not a book meant to teach doctrine. Each statement in Job is not a direct teaching. Instead, the book falls into the category of poetry, and as such contains quite a bit of narrative. That is to say that the book contains a lot of historical record of what people said. A lot of the Bible is actually written in the narrative without commentary about what is right or wrong. Take Genesis 34 for example. This chapter relates the story of how Jacob’s sons brutally slaughtered an entire city of people. There’s no commentary about whether or not what they did is right or wrong. Jacob complains about the anticipated consequences to himself, but there is no statement as to whether they were in the right or in the wrong.
This is what we have in Job. The verses that are cited are a prime example of misinterpretation. In the context of the book itself, this passage is simply relating the sorrow of Job. He was so sorrowful that he wished he were never born, that his mother had miscarried. There is no commentary here as to whether his feelings are right or wrong. The fact that God silenced him later in the book and Job then repented of his earlier statements could be used to say that these statements by Job were sinful. That’s more than I'd like to to say about the passage, though, at least for the purposes of this article. The important thing to remember is that in its context, this passage has no bearing on the abortion issue. The purpose and tenor of the passage is to relate the deep suffering that Job was undergoing. To add anything more to it would be committing a gross error of misinterpretation.
Thank you for your question, and I hope you found my answer helpful (although poorly written). If anyone has any questions they'd like me to address in a blog, feel free to leave a comment for me. Please tell me who you are though!
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