Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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On Existential Providence

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God’s in charge.

He’s sovereign; his will is always accomplished. That includes the big things, and the tiny little things. In my case, tiny little things brought existential results: I wouldn’t exist without them.

My Mom grew up in Brockton, MA, the daughter of hardworking and really interesting Universalists. On graduation from high school, she went to secretarial school and then moved to Baltimore during World War II to work some sort of secretarial job. She got an apartment with a roommate named Nikki.

Dad grew up in the Pacific Northwest, born in Salmon, ID. By age 13 he’d lost both of his parents, and he finished his youth under the freewheeling stewardship of his older siblings, mostly in Spokane, WA, and LA (where he experienced the Long Beach earthquake of 1933). Around 1944 he volunteered for the Army, mostly, I suspect, to get out of the house. Basic training at Camp Roberts in California, then off on a troop ship to the Philippines, as a replacement soldier for the combat-depleted 31st “Dixie” Division, known today as the Alabama National Guard. Spent time on both Leyte and Mindanao, with little combat; made a little extra money by cutting other soldiers’ hair in the jungle.

When the war ended, he returned Stateside and was sent to Fort Meade, MD, during the last days of his enlistment.

One weekend he got a pass and went into Baltimore.

I dunno, I think I’d have gone to Washington. But he went to Baltimore.

He and a buddy or two dropped in to a café to get something to eat. As they were getting seated, Dad noticed another couple of soldiers making a clumsy pass at two girls who were paying their bill at the register. The girls clearly didn’t want to talk, but the guys kept trying.

Dad got up and told them to knock it off. We can all see they don’t want to talk to you; leave them alone, and get out.

They were privates. Dad was a corporal. They got out.

Dad said a few words to one of the girls. Yeah, she was my Mom.

And 8 years later, along came Yours Truly.

So for me, this is really an existential story. I wouldn’t be here if that hadn’t happened. And oh, yeah, neither would my sisters.

What are the odds?

How did a boy from Idaho, 2 miles down from the Continental Divide, end up in the Philippines with a unit from Alabama?

And how did he and the future Mrs. O. end up in Baltimore, where neither of them had ever been before, at the same time for completely unrelated reasons?

And how did they end up at the same hole-in-the-wall café on supper shifts that overlapped by about 10 minutes?

What if he’d come to supper 15 minutes later?

What if a couple of jerks hadn’t hassled the girls on their way out?

What if?

Our lives are an endless stream of details, winding in and out of other endless streams, sometimes apart, but occasionally intersecting. And those intersections are usually brief and trivial and quickly forgotten. What was the name of the guy you greeted on the way into the drugstore yesterday afternoon?

But sometimes those intersections change lives, and those times they change all the world for the people involved.

And God oversees and directs the whole symphony.

The God who raises up kings and sets them down again, who empowers the existence and continuance of the whole universe, who sees that the water cycle and the seasonal cycle continue despite our attempts to contort and convolute them, this God engineers the tiny little details as well.

The tiny little trivial ones, and the tiny little existential ones.

I’m glad of that.

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Cry, the Beloved Country

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I visited South Africa for the first time in the year 2000. I tell my friends, and my students, that you cannot visit Africa without leaving a piece of your heart there. I love many countries and people in Africa, but South Africa is as close to my heart as any. It has a stark beauty in its land, in its people, in its many languages, even in its accents.

My favorite place in the world, oddly enough, is not in my homeland; it is in South Africa—Dias Beach, at the Cape of Good Hope. It’s like no other beach—or place—in the world.

And so it’s hard to put into words how deeply my heart was broken by the news that the South African Parliament, which meets in Cape Town, has voted to expropriate farms owned by whites without any payment, to establish justice for apartheid.

It’s not certain yet; the proposed constitutional amendment needs to be approved by the Constitutional Review Committee, which will render a decision by August, and then be approved by 2/3 of Parliament. I’m not well enough informed on South African politics to guess on the odds of that happening. But I do enough theology to comment on the underlying causes.

For decades the South African government viewed black Africans as inferior and instituted a system of segregation and discrimination against blacks that it called apartheid, Afrikaans for “apartness.” It was similar in many ways to conditions in the Jim Crow South, though there were some differences in the particulars.

One law was that blacks were not allowed to own land. The predictable result was that virtually all private land was owned by whites. Under increasing world pressure, the white government abolished apartheid in the early 1990s, and former prisoner Nelson Mandela rode a wave of popular support to the presidency in 1994.

It was a precarious time. There were cries for retribution in the name of justice, and whites, whether landowners or not, were afraid. To pretty much everyone’s relief, Mandela rose to the occasion, declaring that there would be justice for all, but not revenge. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to hear testimonies of injustice and abuse under apartheid. The truth was both told and heard, and the explosive situation was handled deftly. Every white South African I’ve spoken to in the years since has told me that Mandela was a good man. They mourned his death alongside his black countrymen, who called him by the tribal honorific “Madiba.”

Mandela was a flawed man, like any other. He did foolish and sinful things in his younger days. But I have respected his conscious decision to rise above revenge to act for the good of his country. We all could benefit from more such men.

So South Africa prospered, unlike its near neighbor Zimbabwe, which raced headlong into revenge mode. Under the dictator Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe confiscated white-owned farms in the name of retribution and justice. The country swiftly descended into economic chaos, and societal chaos quickly followed. When I visited Zimbabwe in 2010 you could buy a 1 billion dollar note as a souvenir for a couple of US dollars; the Zimbabwean retailers wouldn’t even take Zimbabwean money, but our US dollars were welcome.

I don’t know what will happen in South Africa. The new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, claims the confiscations will be done in a way not to cause economic harm. I don’t see any way he can keep that promise. I’m afraid that South Africa is about to learn that killing the goose doesn’t yield any more golden eggs. And a great country will face a long period of economic and social hardship.

This is what sin does.

God created men and women—all of them—in his image. World history is an unbroken story of peoples in power abusing those out of power, denying their imageship. And that sin, like all sin, has consequences, and long-lasting ones at that—consequences that outlast generations. Apartheid set the stage for suspicion, hatred, revenge; and this generation and future generations will reap a bitter harvest.

My prayer is for grace, mercy, and peace for all the dear people of South Africa. May the gracious hearts of my many South African friends—black, white, and coloured, in places like Guguletu, Kuilsrivier, and Beverly Park—prevail to bring peace and mutual respect to their beautiful land.

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On Reading Numbers (the Book, not the Digits)

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Well, you got through Leviticus, and you found that it’s got a real devotional punch if you pay attention to the big ideas. And now you’re in Numbers. Funny name. Lots of repetition. And details. And, well, numbers.

What’s with that?

When Numbers begins, Israel is still at Sinai, where they’ve been for the year since leaving Egypt. They’ve received the Law (that’s the last part of Exodus, and all of Leviticus), and they’re preparing to continue to Canaan. When Numbers ends, the people of Israel are at the Jordan River, ready to enter the land (Dt 1.1). For those of you keeping score, that means that the entire 40 years of wilderness wandering takes place in Numbers.

So what’s with the numbers? What’s that all about?

Oh, this is really good. Really good.

The book begins, as you might expect, with numbers: a census. God directs Moses to count all the men in the Israelite army (Num 1.2-3). Moses obeys, and we’re told that Israel’s army numbers just over 600,000 (Num 1.46).

Hold that thought.

Now Israel prepares to travel from Sinai, what we might call Constitution City, to their permanent home, promised by God to Abraham all those centuries ago. If there are 600,000 soldiers, then you probably have about 2 million people in all, and moving that many people around is going to require some organization. So God describes the organization of the camp (Num 2); the jobs of the Levites in breaking down, carrying, and setting up the Tabernacle (Num 3-4); and the dedication of the Tabernacle to active service (Num 7-9).

Now we’re ready to move. Off we go.

The Israelites decamp and head for Canaan (Num 10-12), arriving at Kadesh-Barnea, near Canaan’s southern border, where God instructs them to investigate the land they’re about to enter (Num 13). What they see makes them afraid, and they refuse the land God has assured them is theirs (Num 14). God sends them on a 40-year hiatus, where the fearful adults will all die, leaving their “vulnerable” children to take the land by force (Num 14.28-35).

Yikes. That’s a turn of events.

And the rest of the book describes the torturous turns of those 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. Someone has estimated that for those 40 years, about 85 people died every day, on average, until all the adults were gone. That’s 40 years of daily grief, reminding Israel of the perils of faithlessness.

God is killing them all. Will he eradicate them? Or will he keep his promise to Abraham, 400 years ago, that they would occupy the land (Gen 17.8)?

Well, that’s where the numbers come in.

In chapter 26, Israel has arrived at the plains of Moab, just across the Jordan River from Jericho and the rest of The Land. All the older generation is gone now, and the current generation can see the land ahead of them. Will they be able to take it?

God answers their question with a second census. Count all the soldiers, he says. They do.

How many soldiers are there? 600,000 (Num 26.51). Just as many as there were before.

In judgment, God remembers mercy. He destroys the faithless generation, but he sees to it that four decades later, the army is just as large as it was before, despite their less-than-ideal living and breeding conditions.

The promise is still good. The land is still theirs. God’s judgment has not disabled the promise.

The numbers have spoken.

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One Tiny Reason Why I’m Not a Secular Humanist

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One Wednesday evening I was driving to an elders’ meeting at my church. Because I had taught a 4 pm class, I had just 40 minutes, from 4:50 to 5:30, to get to the meeting. And at 5 the traffic picks up considerably on the arterial I need to drive on, so the pressure’s on. Sometimes I just skip supper and wait to eat till I get home, but that day I was hungry—hangry—and there’s a Hardee’s right on the way so, maybe, if I time it just right, I can rush out of class, get on the road before the crush starts, and pop into the drive-through lane for a quick burger that I can eat on the way. Boy, that would be great.

No students need to talk to me after class—that’s the first auspicious sign. I skip dropping my stuff off at the office and hustle to the car, parked right outside the classroom building, and throw the books into the back seat. Fire up the car, straight ahead, left at the gym, out the side gate, right to the light, left to the Hardee’s. Not much traffic so far.

Nobody in line at the drive-through! Awesome! I pull into the parking lot and swing around to the order spot. Hustle, hustle, hustle.

The voice comes on. I order the mushroom and swiss burger, “Just the sandwich, please.”

“Would you like fries with that?”

“No thank you, just the sandwich, please.”

“How about a drink?”

“No, just the sandwich.”

“Could I interest you in a—“

“JUST THE SANDWICH!”

Oh, great. My single-minded focus on my own little problem has just led me to yell at a perfectly nice teen-aged girl who’s working hard and taking responsibility for her own life, just like I always say teen-agers ought to. And in a minute I’m going to pull up at her window and have to talk to her face to face.

What an idiom. What a maroon.

I briefly consider just driving away, but that would be, well, cowardly, and plus, I’m still hungry.

So I pull around to the window, and the little wisp of a thing leans out of the window and says, “I’m sorry, sir, but I have to ask you those questions. I’ll get fired if I don’t.”

I tell her I’m sorry, and I know she was just doing her job, and she’s doing an excellent job at that, and what I said was uncalled for, and I’m sorry, and I’m really, really sorry.

And I was. Because I was wrong. Utterly, completely, abysmally wrong.

Where did that rudeness come from? I was on my way to an elders’ meeting, for crying out loud. At church. All for Jesus!

That rudeness showed up because it was in there. Because it’s a part of who I am. Self-centered. Impatient. Unkind. Just rude.

I want to think otherwise. I really do. I’m a good person, right?

No, I’m not. Not because people are basically good, and not because I had two good parents, and not because I grew up learning to get along with siblings, and not because we didn’t have video games when I was a boy, and not because uphill both ways.

And this after more than 50 years of sanctifying work by the ever-faithful Spirit of God. After all this time, you’d think I’d be better than this.

But I’m not.

And that, my friend, is just one tiny reason, of many, why I’m not a secular humanist.

From every stormy wind that blows,
From every swelling tide of woes,
There is a calm, a sure retreat—
’Tis found beneath the mercy seat.

Hugh Stowell

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On Reading Leviticus: Grace in the Details, Part 2

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Last time we noted that the details in Leviticus remind us that the Law is impossible to keep; we’re going to need help. This time we’ll note another principle the Law teaches us, and where to go from here.

The Law Doesn’t Work

The Bible sometimes seems to be ambivalent about the Law. Paul criticizes the Law in Galatians and Romans—“the very commandment that promised life proved to be death for me” (Rom 7.10)—but in the midst of that he says that “the Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Rom 7.12). David sings that “the Law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Ps 19.7), but God himself says through the prophet Ezekiel, “I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life” (Ezek 20.25).

Well then. Which is it?

One thing you notice about all those sacrifices in Leviticus is that they don’t seem to work—not really. Every fall there’s a big Day of Atonement (Lev 16), when the high priest goes through special preparation and then, alone, disappears behind the veil of the Tabernacle / Temple. There he sprinkles blood before the very presence of God himself, who declares that he resides in the space between the cherubim on the “mercy seat,” the solid-gold cover of the ark (Isa 37.16). And in doing that, he cleanses the Temple from the sins of the whole nation (Lev 16.16, 19).

But next fall, the high priest is going to have to do it all over again. The old sacrifice will have worn off. It didn’t work. Oh, it achieved cleansing for a time, but in the final analysis it didn’t take care of the problem it’s addressing. The problem is still there.

Every morning the priest goes to the altar and offers the morning sacrifice, for the sins of the people (Ex 29.38ff). By late afternoon it’s worn off, and we need an evening sacrifice to take care of the continuing failures of the day. It didn’t work.

Every time you sin, you go to Jerusalem and offer another sin offering. But when you sin the next time, you have to do it again. It didn’t solve your problem. It didn’t work.

The Law would be great, if only it worked.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a priest who could offer one sacrifice for sins forever?

The Law Is Good. Really.

Have you ever tried to use a slot-head screwdriver with a Phillips-head screw? You try to get the job done one-eighth of a turn at a time, and the screwdriver keeps slipping out of the slot that it wasn’t designed to fit, and you tear up the screw head so much that you’re never going to be able to get it in or out, and you throw the screwdriver across the room in disgust. “Stupid screwdriver!”

No, not stupid screwdriver. Unwise tool user. A slot-head screwdriver isn’t designed to drive a Phillips-head screw. That’s not what it’s for. Don’t blame the screwdriver.

God designed the Law for a purpose. If God is God, then the Law accomplishes that purpose perfectly. If you’re frustrated with it, then maybe you’re trying to use it to do something it was never designed to do.

Why would God make a Law that’s impossible to keep? Why would he make one that keeps driving us back to the same altar, day after day, year after year?

Because the Law isn’t designed for us to keep. It’s designed to show us that we can’t keep it (Rom 3.20). It’s designed to drive us to God for mercy. And it’s designed to showcase the remarkable way he’s chosen to show that mercy.

The only way to avoid the frustration of living on the road to Jerusalem is to live in such a way that you never need to go there to offer a sacrifice for your own sin. Because we can’t do that, God himself, in mercy, steps into a human body and keeps the Law perfectly in precisely the ways we have not. He dies to become the perfect sacrifice, effective for all time, for all sin, for all who believe (Heb 10.12). And then he comes to us, broken by the Law—that’s what it was for—and invites us to receive the benefit of his atoning sacrifice and the righteousness that he has lived out for us (2Co 5.21).

The Law has done exactly what he designed it to do. It has broken us, frustrated us, and in our frustration it has driven us to the Christ (Gal 3.24).

Perfect.

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On Reading Leviticus: Grace in the Details, Part 1

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If you’re following a plan to read through your Bible in 2018, chances are you’re in Leviticus or have just finished it. Maybe it was a hard slog for you. All those sacrifices, all those procedures, all those animal parts. When do we start learning about the Gospel? About Jesus?

Let me encourage you to take a closer look—or perhaps to sit back in your chair and think about the implications of what you’ve been reading. Let me suggest a couple of life-changing principles that spring from what you’ve just read.

The Law Is Impossible

Let’s take a high flyover view of the Law for a moment.

God says that the penalty for sin is death (Rom 6.23). Specifically, he told the Jews that payment for sin required shedding of blood (Lev 17.11). But then he said, graciously, that you could offer the death of an animal in the place of yourself. That’s a huge relief, and it’s a glorious grace.

But here’s the thing. You can’t just go out in back of the house and kill a lamb. No, you have to offer the lamb to God. And in OT times, that means you have to take the lamb to where God is—in the place where he has placed his name (Lev 17.4, 9; Dt 12.5ff). During the wilderness wanderings, that meant wending your way through thousands of tents to the center of camp, where the Tabernacle was illuminated by the pillar of cloud, the sign of God’s presence. During the period of the judges it meant going to the Tabernacle’s more-or-less permanent location at Gilgal or Shiloh or Bethel or Nob or Gibeon or, finally, Jerusalem. And under Solomon and the divided monarchy, it meant going to the Temple in Jerusalem.

During the Babylonian Captivity, when there was no Temple—that was the greatest tragedy of the exile—there could be no sacrifices. But when Judah returned to the Land, the Second Temple, again on the Jerusalem site, served as the location until the Romans destroyed it shortly after Christ’s earthly ministry.

So. You live in Dan, in Galilee, and you sin. You have to offer a sacrifice. You saddle up and head for Jerusalem. It takes two days—longer if it’s after the Assyrian action of 722 BC and you’re too bigoted to go through Samaria. On arrival, you purchase a lamb at the Temple—that’s a lot easier than bringing one from home—and present it at the top of the steps, where you lay your hands on its head, symbolizing the transfer of your sin, and the priest takes it to the altar, where he executes it according to those instructions in Leviticus.

Done. Forgiven. Time to go home.

Saddle up and head north. You get home in two days.

The trip has taken at least 4 days. When’s the last time you went four days without sinning?

Houston, we have a problem.

You’d better move to Jerusalem, my friend, because if you don’t, you’re going to spend your entire pitiable life on the road.

It’s impossible.

You can’t do this, even if you’re a detail person. Especially if you’re a detail person.

You’re going to need help.

Next time we’ll look at a second life-changing principle, and at the solution to which both of these principles point.

Keep reading Leviticus. It’s a book about love.

Part 2

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On National Conversations

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Another school shooting. Another subsequent sequence, one that, horrifically, we’ve gotten used to. Shock. Grief. Exposes of the shooter. Identification of causes, conveniently aligned with our political positions. Charges that the other side—and only the other side—is “politicizing” a tragedy. Snarky posts. Angry comment threads. And calls for a “national conversation”—in this case, on guns.

Back in 2009, when the national focus was on police shooting of unarmed black civilians, Attorney General Eric Holder was widely mocked by the political opposition for calling for a “national conversation” on race. Some conservatives charged that when liberals call for a “national conversation,” what they mean is “Shut up and do what I say.”

Of course that’s not fair. People are all different, even those in the same group; it’s conservatives who resist “class-conscious” thinking as Marxist. You and I can’t really say—accurately—that “all liberals” or “all conservatives” mean this thing when they say that thing.

But I’d like to try to go beyond the political posturing and the mud-slinging and the parading of moral superiority of “my side”—and I do have a side, which I’ll not state, for reasons that I hope will soon become clear—to encouraging us to think more deeply about our assumptions on all of this.

I’ve noted before that political victory is fleeting and that a great many things are more important because they last forever. That fact should certainly drive any “conversation.”

But I wonder if we might probe a little deeper. What’s the point of a conversation? To win the argument and rest in our smug confidence? To gain political ground and the consequent political power, so we can make everyone else—especially those morons who disagree with us—do what we want? Or to solve the problem?

What kind of conversation will lead to a solution?

Here’s where I get controversial.

A conversation that leads to a solution will not involve everyone, because not everyone has something of substance to contribute.

We all know what it’s like when everyone talks at once. And even when people take turns, we all know from experience that not everybody has something useful to say. (I know you’ve been in a meeting like that, as I have. Far too many times.)

A conversation that leads to a solution will involve people who (1) know what they’re talking about and (2) are interested more in arriving at a solution than in winning the argument.

Jim Geraghty recently expressed frustration with people who advocate for gun control but in the process demonstrate that they have no basic knowledge of how guns work. They’re ready to pontificate for everybody, but they think automatic weapons are legal—or that an automatic weapon was used in this shooting or that one (chances are, it wasn’t). They call a magazine a “clip.” They use the term “assault rifle” as if it actually means something.

Now, I grant that knowing the difference between a clip and a magazine, or a round and a bullet, is probably not going to affect any policy outcome. And I also grant that liberals aren’t the only ones who demonstrate on occasion that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

But what about the principle? Won’t we be more effective with national policy if we convene people with expertise and experience, get them away from the noise, and then listen to what they say? If we base our positions on hard data rather than political expediency?

  • How effective are various kinds of gun laws?
  • What are the primary avenues of illegal gun traffic?
  • What psychological conditions are most likely to result in violence?
    • Is shooting violence different in causation from other violence?
    • How can those psychological conditions most effectively be identified?
    • Is there a statistically significant correspondence between the use of antidepressants and violence? Is there a control group available for comparison?
  • Why do so many shootings happen in schools? Are there data on that, or is everybody just assuming his thesis?
  • What are the best practices in building security?

Come on; the military has been doing building security for centuries; the knowledge is out there. Why not use it?

I see the danger in what I’m saying. Elitism. Trust the smart people—you know, the ones from the Ivy League. The smartest ones in the room.

That’s a danger, all right, for many reasons, most obviously that the elites haven’t done all that great a job of running the country since, oh, 1800 or so. (Happy 286th birthday, Mr. President!)

But I’m not talking about the Ivy League. I’m talking about people with demonstrated expertise and success in the field in question. In this particular issue, many of those people may never even have gone to college. Let them talk. And listen to them.

I have a friend, whom I like very much, who has one really irritating characteristic. When we’re sitting together in an audience, he’ll keep whispering comments in my ear when I’m trying to listen to the speaker. And I have to choose between being polite to my friend or getting the information I’m there to get.

So. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, keep your opinions to yourself, so we can hear the people we came to hear.

Assuming, that is, that you want to solve the problem.

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On Revival

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This week my school is having its annual Bible Conference. The theme for this year is revival. As part of the program, various faculty members and students are presenting brief accounts of American revivals. What follows is my presentation Wednesday morning on the Great Awakening.

——-

It’s 50 years before the American Revolution. What will one day be the United States of America is a collection of 13 British colonies huddled against the Eastern Seaboard. Its people have come here for many reasons. Some have come seeking an economic chance by dint of hard work in land that no one has ever plowed; some have come to escape dark stories in the Old Country. Some have been here for a hundred years; their grandfathers and great-grandfathers came seeking religious freedom, the liberty to worship God after the dictates of their own consciences.

But that path is never easy, and it’s never certain. Eight of the colonies now have established churches, with the financial support and legal backing of the colonial governments. What happens when the church is the same as the governmental power? It’s usually not a pretty picture. Church leaders get comfortable and complacent and sometimes abusive. External conformity and empty formalism become the tradition, and people think that God is on their side because they drop by his house every week and say the right words, even though they don’t think much about what they’re actually saying.

So lots of people are claiming the name of Christ without living like it. Worldliness is common. Rationalism, the rejection of the supernatural, is making inroads. There is no passion.

A preacher in Pennsylvania, with his sons, begins to speak out against the spiritual laziness, exemplifying by personal passion that following Christ is serious business. People begin to listen to William Tennent, to respond to his message. Soon more want to hear the preaching than their little team can reach, and they set out to train more preachers to meet the need. Their little “Log College” (1727), what we today call Princeton University, will encourage a wave of new ministry training schools: Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), Dartmouth (1769)—a good chunk of what we call today the “Ivy League.”

In 1739 British evangelist George Whitefield travels up and down the colonies preaching. People swarm to hear him; when the crowds are so great that no building will hold them, they move to the fields and pastures, where Whitefield’s booming voice reaches them all. Benjamin Franklin, intrigued by the work of a God he does not know, befriends Whitefield and listens to him preach. Franklin writes in his Autobiography,

In 1739 arriv’d among us from England the Rev. Mr. Whitefield, who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant Preacher. … The Multitudes of all … Denominations that attended his Sermons were enormous and it was [a] matter of Speculation to me who was one of the Number, to observe the extraordinary Influence of his Oratory on his Hearers, and how much they admir’d and respected him, notwithstanding his common Abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half Beasts and half Devils. It was wonderful to see the Change soon made in the Manners of our Inhabitants; from being thoughtless or indifferent about Religion, it seem’d as if all the World were growing Religious; so that one could not walk thro’ the Town in an Evening without Hearing Psalms sung in different Families of every Street.

With Whitefield the flame moves northward. Jonathan Edwards, a pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts, preaches his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), and the people respond with cries for mercy.

But there is resistance. The powerful religious leadership is scandalized by the inelegant displays of emotion and by the sometimes overexuberant responses. In defense of the revival, Edwards writes his work “Religious Affections” (1746) to argue that our relationship with God should involve the whole man, our emotions as well as our minds. He writes the work “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God” (1744) to separate the legitimate outbreaks from the opportunistic ones: a genuine work, he says, will include conversion, a rejection of worldliness, a love for the Scripture, and a love for God and man. In a letter to a friend, Edwards describes what he saw in Northampton:

In the month of May 1741, a sermon was preached to a company at a private house. Near the conclusion of the exercise, one or two persons that were professors were so greatly affected with a sense of the greatness and glory of divine things, and the infinite importance of the things of eternity, that they were not able to conceal it; the affection of their minds overcoming their strength, and having a very visible effect on their bodies. When the exercise was over, the young people that were present removed into the other room for religious conference; and particularly that they might have opportunity to inquire of those that were thus affected what apprehensions they had, and what things they were that thus deeply impressed their minds. And there soon appeared a very great effect of their conversation; the affection was quickly propagated through the room; many of the young people and children that were professors appeared to be overcome with a sense of the greatness and glory of divine things, and with admiration, love, joy and praise, and compassion to others that looked upon themselves as in a state of nature. And many others at the same time were overcome with distress about their sinful and miserable state and condition; so that the whole room was full of nothing but outcries, faintings, and suchlike.

The movement subsides in New England about 1760, just as inexplicably as it had begun.

But its effects continue. Americans see a religious diversity, and they like the freedom of choice that comes with it. All the colonies find a new shared experience that draws them together. It’s no surprise that less than two decades later, the colonies are ready to take on the tyranny of King George himself—and to defeat him. One leader of the Revolution, our second president, John Adams, wrote,

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.

And so it ever is. Unbelieving churches shrivel and die, even as the old “mainline churches” are dying today. But God’s Spirit moves among his people, and the story goes out; and God brings to himself uncounted sinners who find rescue and grace and mercy and peace—and who rejoice in that rescue in ways that shake the world.

Photo by Matt McLean on Unsplash

Somewhere Out There

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OK, that car thing was really cool. Sure, it was a waste of a really good car, in the most materialistic of senses, and sure, it was symbol over substance, and sure, they’re saying the radiation will destroy it in a year, and sure, it’ll never actually get to Mars, and sure, even if it did, without any propulsion it would just crash into it and join the rest of the rust.

But still, it was really, really cool. Sometimes symbol is every bit as important as substance.

And it got me thinking.

Wouldn’t it be even cooler if somebody found it, out there, somewhere? What would they think? What would they do?

The half-full folks think, “They’d know we’re here! And they’d come looking for us! And share their technology! And wouldn’t that be just awesome!”

And the half-empty folks think, “Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?! They’d know we’re here! And they’d come looking for us! And make us slaves! Or eat us! Or something!”

Well, I’ll observe that if they come looking for us, then they’re way more advanced than we are, and the outcome is going to be pretty much out of our hands at that point.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Shouldn’t we be asking if there’s a “they” at all?

A lot of people think there is. Are. Whatever.

I suppose we think like that because we want to. We’re social people—God made us that way (Gen 2.18)—and we want there to be Others. And since we’re broken, and everybody we know here is broken (Rom 3.23), maybe we like to hold out hope that there will be less irritating people Out There.

So we posit reasons and evidences. Evolutionists argue that as many galaxies as there are, there must be bazillions of planets, and a lot of them must be in the Goldilocks zone, and surely the odds favor that evolution has happened out there too. (Methinks they misoverestimate the odds that evolution happened even here.)

Even my fellow Christians—using the term fellow relatively loosely—have suggested biblical evidence for life on other planets:

Well, suppose we get a little more, um, down to earth, and give a little theological thought to the subject?

  • Could God have created life on other planets?
    • Of course! He’s omnipotent, and a multivariate creation of life is certainly not inconsistent with his nature.
  • Wouldn’t he have told us?
    • Not necessarily. There’s a LOT he hasn’t told us (Dt 29.29). He’s infinite, you may recall.

This possibility does raise a bunch of questions. For example,

  • Has this hypothetical extraterrestrial race been created in the image of God?
  • If so, has it fallen into sin?
  • If so, has God willed to redeem it? (Would it violate his nature not to redeem his image?)
  • If so, …
    • Is more than one method of redemption possible in some other planetary cosmos? Or is the specific method of redemption tied to the unchanging nature of God?
    • Or does the Son—or even a different member of the Godhead—incarnate with them and endure another death?
    • Or does God simply reveal to them what he has done on another planet (ours) and offer to apply it to them?
    • Are any of the above options completely ruled out by what we know of the nature of God?

I’ll tell you what we do know.

God has invested us with a stewardship here, and now, on this planet, and we need to make that our first priority. Speculation on matters like this are useful in that they can exercise our theological thinking and may provide insights into other theological questions. But they cannot replace direct obedience to the Great Commission (Mt 28.19-20) and to our fundamental purpose as images of God here on earth (1Co 10.31; Rom 11.36).

So that’s enough speculation for today. Let’s get back to Kingdom work, my fellow princes and princesses.

But that car is really cool.

Photo credit: SpaceX

On Blind Faith and God

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I believe in God.

More specifically, I believe in the God of the Bible.

A lot of people don’t.

And once in a while, one of them will ask me, sincerely, how an apparently happy, confident, reasonably intelligent person like me can do that. Isn’t that just blind faith? Isn’t religion just a crutch for the weak, a Magic 8-Ball for the unintelligent, an opiate for the masses?

Sometimes, yes. More than that—I think most religions are all of the above.

But not this one.

So what’s my particular delusion? Why the inconsistency?

Not so fast. Let me explain.

After a lifetime of study and growth, I realize that I’m a believer because God graciously drew me to himself. But from my perspective through that process, it didn’t look like that. It appeared to me that I was making a series of choices (and yes, I was).

  • First I chose to follow the example of my parents. Most children do that.
  • Then I chose to reject all that, and my life got less pleasant in hurry.
  • Motivated more by a selfish desire for happiness than anything numinous, I chose to return to what I had learned earlier, and it worked pretty well. The unpleasantness of the earlier lifestyle went away.
  • And so I stayed, and I began to learn things along the way.
  • I learned, first, that the Bible is an unusual book—one that can’t be explained naturally.
  • As so I began to take it seriously, and I chose to believe what it told me about my sinful self—I’d proved that in the lab already—and about what God had done to restore me to himself. I moved from a largely intellectual belief to an experienced conviction that this—knowing this God—was what I was made for.

Along the way I realized that there were a lot of things about this God that I didn’t understand. And it occurred to me that this was exactly what I should expect. If we had made God up—as an opiate, or whatever—we wouldn’t have made one who occasionally troubled us and, worse, embarrassed us in front of our friends; we’d have made him simpler. But if there really is a God, by definition infinite, then we would expect that he would regularly exceed the limits of our finite minds; he would occasionally go over the horizon of our understanding.

That wasn’t difficult for me to embrace. But the hard question is this:

What do you do when he does that? How do you respond when God mystifies or troubles you—when he seems to disappoint you?

Let me respond to that question with its parallel. What do you do when a long-time friend mystifies or troubles you?

I’ve been married for 33 years. I know my dear wife pretty well. She’s retired, and I’m still working. That means that for several hours each day, I’m unable to be at home, and she’s COMPLETELY unaccountable.

I don’t worry.

And not because “I’m all that,” and she’d be a fool to let me go.

No, it’s because I know this woman. I’ve lived with her for 33 years. I know what she’s like. She’s not going to disappoint me.

That’s how healthy relationships work. You trust your friends. And that’s most certainly not blind faith; it’s solidly founded—scientifically founded, if you will—on experience in the lab and in the field.

Nobody wants a marriage where your spouse is constantly checking up on you, constantly fearing that you’re going to do something awful. I don’t check the odometer on the car every night to see if the wife is putting more miles on it than her account of her day would support. Friends don’t treat each other like that.

And I’m not going to treat God like that either. I’m not going to assume the worst whenever something happens that I don’t understand.

Sometimes God goes over the horizon on me. Sometimes his ways puzzle me, and I can’t figure out what he’s up to. But in those moments, I trust him. I trust him because he has always been faithful to me—despite the many times I’ve been unfaithful to him. I trust him scientifically, because he’s proved himself to me in the lab and in the field.

That’s how healthy relationships work.

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash