Those Not Evangelized

I’ve read two books on St. Paul recently, one that was copyrighted in 2012 and the other in 1896.  I learned quite a bit about Paul from both.

One of the books mentioned that Christianity’s influence in Asia Minor was primarily to the Greek speaking people in the cities.  The people in the rural areas who spoke the Phrygian language were not evangelized by Christians. [1]  In Paul’s travels around  Asia  Minor, he visited certain places and not others.  As Acts 16:6-7 tells us Paul was forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach in Asia and Bithynia.  Will God send all the people who were by passed by Paul on his journeys to hell?  Because Paul did not go to them, they had no opportunity to hear and believe.

As we have asked in my book, The Renovation of Our Soul, this applies to a multitude of people around the world.  For centuries, people in North America, South America, Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific had no opportunity to be saved.  Is this a God of mercy, love, and justice?  There must be something we do not understand about God’s plan of salvation.

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[1]   W. M. Ramsay.  St. Paul the Traveller.  New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896, p. 132.

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Personal Tragedy

A woman was lamenting the death of her son in a car accident.  She asks why God did this to her.  A hospital chaplain replies that God did not have anything to do with her son’s death and the woman snapped back, “Don’t you take away the only hope that I have”. [1]  Like many who suffer devastating tragedy, she was hoping God had some significant reason for imposing so great a loss upon her.

If we stand back and objectively look at the personal tragedies we experience in our lives, we must face the fact that most are meaningless.  The author of the book of Ecclesiastes (who is identified as the Preacher, who is thought to be Solomon, and who many consider the wisest man who ever lived) provides us with a whole book full of examples.  In fact he states that all of life is vanity (Ecclesiastes 1:2), or as other translations put it, all of life is a vapor, is meaningless, or is pointless.

Now most commentaries conclude Ecclesiastes teaches that life not centered on God is meaningless.  They have a hard time accepting the fact that our existence is pointless.  However, look at what the Preacher says.  Whether one is centered on God or not does not change the fact that there is nothing new under the sun (1:9-10), that no one is remembered after their death (1:11), that work is meaningless because we must leave the results to someone and we do not know if they will put it to good use (2:17), that God has set eternity in our hearts yet we cannot understand what God has done in eternity (3:11), that we cannot not really know what happens to our spirit after death (3:21), that oppression exists for all regardless of their beliefs (4:1-3), that wisdom is difficult to obtain (7:23-24), that “. . .The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned. . .” (9:11), that wisdom is better than strength but wisdom is not always rewarded (9:13-16), that we cannot understand the works of God (11:5}.

The Preacher states what we know to be true, if we are honest about what we have experienced and know about our life.  He gives us an accurate portrayal of the human condition.   Do we really think that 500 years from now any of us will be remembered?  Do we really think that 500 years from now the events of our lives will have a meaningful impact on that generation?  To answer that question, do you know who your ancestors were 500 years ago?  What do you know of their lives?

So what is the conclusion of the wisest man who ever lived given that our lives are meaningless?  The Preacher simply states:

The end of the matter; all has been heard.   Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.   For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.  (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 ESV)

What makes our lives meaningful is the type of person we become.  What makes our lives meaningful is if we utilize our life experiences, whatever they are, to become more like God.  The events of our lives are fleeting moments in eternity but what will live forever is our soul.  And we determine what our soul will be like by the decisions we make, by our deeds, by whether we keep God’s commandments during the seemingly meaningless events of our lives.

So how should we respond to people who are experiencing deep and painful suffering such as the woman who lost her son?  In such a situation our first response is to provide comfort and trying to correct someone’s theology at such a time is not appropriate.  Even though God is not responsible for all that occurs on our earth (we do have free will), in times like these we need the faith that Paul expresses in Romans 8:28:  “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”  Even the seemingly meaningless and sorrowful events of our lives will work together for our good if we allow God to do so.

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[1] Marvin Olasky, “What Price Hope”, World Magazine, December 8, 2018, p. 42.

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“Every man is stupid and without knowledge”

Tell me:  which widely read book contains the above statement?

I was very surprised when reading the book of Jeremiah recently to come across this very blunt assessment of the human race.   (Jeremiah 10:14 and Jerimiah 51:17 ESV)

On second thought, it should not be a surprise because the Bible consistently gives an accurate assessment of the human condition and part of the reality of our existence is that we are finite.  Another example from the Bible of this assessment of our abilities is in Job 38 through 41where God asks Job a series of questions about the natural world and Job does not have a clue about the answers.  The purpose of God’s questions to Job is to awaken in Job the realization he does not understand all of God’s purposes.  “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.  ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’  Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”  (Job 42:2-3 ESV)

Job’s realizatlion is what we have consistently shown in this blog.  If we want to correctly understand our predicament we must understand the implications of what it means to be finite.  Because of our success in understanding and controlling our physical world, we tend to be rather arrogant and think our knowledge is so great that every few years someone will make the prediction that soon we will know everything.  The reality of our existence is that we, like Job, talk about things we do not understand.  We have only begun to learn what we need to know.

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The Original Rebellion

Why did God make us finite?  If he wants us to believe in him, why does he hide himself from us (Isaiah 45:15)?  Why does God, in the words of Orual, the main character in C. S. Lewis’ novel Till We Have Faces, hide himself and torment men with glimpses, ask us to believe what contradicts our senses, that he will neither go away and leave us alone nor show himself openly and tell us what he wants? [1]

John Hick suggests that only if we are finite can we truly have free will.  ”the world must be to man. . .as if there were no God.” [2]  Hick’s point is that if it was obvious to all that God existed, we would not we have the free choice of whether to believe in God or not.

But is this the real reason God made us finite; was it to test our belief system?  The problem is that Satan is absolutely certain that God exists and that Jesus died for our sins..  “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!”  (James 2:19 ESV)  Satan’s original rebellion was not a failure to believe, it was that he chose to rebel against God.  Satan exercised his free will in deciding whether he would follow God or go his own way.

So why did God make us finite?

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[1]   C. S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces.  San Diego:  Harcourt Brace & Company, 1956, pp. 236, 243, 244, 249.

[2]   John Hicks.  Evil and the God of Love.  New York:  Palgrave McMillan, 2010, p. 281.

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Saving Souls

In the last blog, we discussed how our Christian upbringing can impact our walk with God.  Specifically our upbringing can determine how we interpret the Bible. [1]  For me, this issue has been resolved but what I still wrestle with is how my upbringing has impacted my belief system.  If I was raised in another culture and religion, would I investigate the claims of Christianity and if I did would I find the evidence for Christianity sufficiently compelling to change?

This issue is illustrated by a Good Friday Uber ride Sophia Lee took.  The driver was a Muslim and he soon was talking about his religion.  Lee stated:  “It was a tough conversation—we were both fully committed to our faiths, and strangely enough, both of us were trying to save each other’s soul”. [1]

So who was right?  Can we Christians prove our faith is the one and only true religion?  The fact is no one has proof the validity of their religion and the reason is because God made us finite.  Now, everyone acknowledges that we are finite; that is obvious every day when we realize there are things about our world that we just do not know and understand (see Job 38 and 39).  The problem is that few of us Christians are willing to discuss the implications of this fact.

One implication is that our ability to know what is true is limited; we must deal with probabilities.  John Warwick Montgomery in History, Law, and Christianity states that probability is the only method we have in deciding to follow Jesus but we must realize that we use probabilities daily in deciding what to do. [2]  Alister E. McGrath in Intellectuals Don’t Need God & Other Modern Myths states that while Christianity makes sense, it ultimately depends upon a leap of faith. [3]  He also notes that essentially all human knowledge is uncertain including our apologetics. [4]  Any Christian who is intellectually honest would admit the same.

The problem is our Christian faith asserts we must believe that Jesus died and was resurrected for our sins if we want to go to heaven but God has made us finite which means we do not have proof for what Jesus accomplished.  Why would God expect us to do something we cannot do?  So how can God send people to hell because they did not believe in Jesus?

Ignoring this question does not make it go away.

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[1]   Sophia Lee, “A Good Friday ride”, World Magazine, June 26, 2021, p. 46.

[2]   John Warwick Montgomery, History, Law, and Christianity (Edmonton, AB, Canada:  Canadian Institute for Law, Theology, and Public Policy, Inc., 2002), pp. 91-93.

[3]   Alister E. McGrath in Intellectuals Don’t Need God & Other Modern Myths (Grand Rapids, MI:  Zondervan Publishing House, 1993), pp. 59-60.

[4]   Ibid., p. 155.

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Always a Christian

Sophia Lee raises an issue that impacts us Christians more than is realized.  She asks:  For those of us raised in the Christian community, is our life is so filled with knowledge of the Bible and Christ, and are we so trained to follow Christian customs that we fail to develop a personal relationship with God? [1]

How many of us can claim a relationship like Moses had with God:  “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. . .” (Exodus 33:11 ESV)?  Very few, if any, but that is a goal we can set for ourselves.  Reaching that goal is not easy.  As C. S. Lewis says:  “Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they [the gods] hear the babble that we think we mean.  How can they meet us face to face until we have faces”. [2]  How can God talk to us as a friend until we know what we truly believe, what we truly stand for, what our soul is like?  Webster’s defines friend as “a person attached to another by feeling of affection or personal regard”.  Friends have something in common.  How much do we have in common with God?

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[1]   Sophia Lee, “Face to Face with God”, World Magazine, August 28, 2021, p. 40.

[2]   C. S. Lewis.  Till We Have Faces.  San Diego:  A Harvest Book, 1956, p. 294.

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Infighting

You will not hear about it much in our church history, but Christians have resorted to violence multiple times when they disagreed on points of theology, even to the extent of killing fellow Christians.  Examples include Athanasius who was “quite prepared to use the violent methods of the streets, when necessary, to accomplish worthwhile goals.” [1]  The historian Ammianus stated:  “no wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most Christians in their deadly hatred of one another”. [2]  The Albigensian crusade in 1209 was quite simply a bloodbath and it was also quite simply a war against what the ruling class thought was heresy.  Some of the combatants asked the religious leaders how they were to distinguish the faithful from the heretics and the answer was reported to be: “kill them all, God knows his own”. [3]

There are many ways of interpreting the scripture and these days we generally do not resort to physical violence when we have disagreements in our theology.  However, do we use other forms of violence such as denigrating those with whom we disagree?  Is this the way Jesus wants us to act?  Did not Jesus instruct us to love even our enemies (Matthew 5:43)?

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[1]   Richard E. Rubenstein.  When Jesus Became God.  Orlando:  Harcourt, Inc., Kindle edition, p. 63

[2]   Rubenstain, p. 194.

[3]Tom Holland.  Dominion.  New York:  Basic Books, p. 261.

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The Foolishness of God

I am reading Dominion:  How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland.  Holland notes that throughout history, humans who claimed to be divine were not all that unusual.  Those who accomplished great tasks (e.g. Egyptian kings, the Greek “hero-god” Heracles, Roman emperors) were considered more divine than human. [1]

At the other end of the social spectrum, Holland notes that crucifixion was used by the Romans to maintain order in the lands they controlled.  Crucifixion was very effective because “no death was more excruciating, more contemptible, than crucifixion”. [2]  It was a punishment fit only for slaves.   Criminals were reserved for a more glamorous death—the coliseum.

What was considered scandalous by most everyone in Jesus’ time was the suggestion that any person who suffered the death of a slave, crucifixion, could possibly be considered divine.

That explains why Paul tells us:  “. . .but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Corinthians 1:23-25 ESV)

To me, the above constitutes one of the greatest arguments for the validity of Christianity.  To imagine that the teachings of a crucified person would, as Holland’s subtitle states, “remake the world” is absolutely incredible and speaks of one who is divine.  The historian Will Durant does not state Jesus is divine but in speaking of  Christianity he states “That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.” [3]  How else could this have happened other than by an action of God?

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[1]   Tom Holland. Dominion.  New York:  Basic Books, 2019, pp. 5-6.

[2]   Holland, p. 2.

[3]   Will Durant, The Story of Civilization:  Caesar and Christ, New York:  Simon and  Schuster, Inc., p. 557.

 

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High Anxiety

Our current world situation—the pandemic, the various political upheavals around the world, the loss in confidence in many of our institutions—is inducing anxiety in many people.  What are we to do?

In Mathew 6:25-34, Jesus instructs us not to be anxious about the future for three reasons.  First, God is in control and an example is how he takes care of the animal and plant life in nature.  Jesus asserts we are more important than animal and plant life so God will surely take care of us.

Second, Jesus promises us that if we “seek first the kingdom and his righteousness and all these things [material things] will be added unto you”.  We do not need to worry about material things in the future if we have our priorities right and our first priority should be spiritual matters, not physical.

Third, Jesus observes something we all should know—the evil we see each day is enough for us to address that day.  Trying to address future evil just adds to our work load and removes our focus on today’s evil. If we address the evil of today, it will go a long way to eliminating the need to address evil in the future.

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What Can We Do?

I have heard the story of a church in Germany during WWII which was located near a railroad track that served one of the concentration camps.  Each Sunday morning a train taking Jewish people to the camp passed by the church and the church members could hear the cry of the people on the train.  Hearing this cry every Sunday morning eventually disturbed the church members and they found themselves singing louder to drown out the cry of the people on the train.

Now many are critical of those church members.  My question is:  If you were a member of that church, what concrete actions would you take to assist the Jewish people?  If you organized an action to stop the train and free the Jewish prisoners, it is a distinct possibility the Nazis would take retaliatory action against that community.  The Nazis were known to randomly round up people in a community that defied their orders and kill them.  If that happened, and it most likely would have, then the members of that church would need to decide who they would save—the Jewish people  on the train or members of their  community.  Knowing this, what action would you have taken?

Many people in Germany during WWII faced this question.  As Bonhoeffer noted, they were “trapped in a situation of ethical impossibilities.  In the light of the monstrous evils being committed all around, what could one do and what should one do?  In letters from his ordinands, we read of how tortured they were in knowing when to protest and when to accede, when to go to war, even if they knew it was unjust, and when to take a stand. . .” [1]

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[1]   Eric Metaxas.  Bonhoeffer.  Nashville:  Thomas Nelson, 2010, pp. 470-471.

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