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

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

home / about / archive 

Subscribe via Email

Dealing with Doubt, Part 2: The Limits of Logic

by 1 Comment

Part 1: The Joy of Doubting

One of the main reasons that Christians wrestle with doubts these days is that they bump into something that doesn’t seem to make sense.

  • Jesus is a human teacher, but he’s also God? How does that work? How can he not know something (Mk 13.32) if he’s omniscient? How do you not know something you know?
  • Why did God have to kill his Son, when his Son didn’t even do anything wrong? Why couldn’t God just forgive us—the way he’s told us to forgive others?
  • If God is great and good, why is there suffering? Isn’t he able to stop the suffering? Doesn’t he want to?

We’re struggling with a simple problem here—none of us is as smart as we think we are.

Come on; you know that’s true. Even if you don’t admit it for yourself, you see it easily in everyone around you. What’s the likelihood that you’re the only exception? :-)

Our minds are wonderful things, wonderful gifts from God that enable us to discover truth. But they are not ultimate authorities—in fact, they couldn’t possibly be, given that no two human minds come to all the same conclusions. That may be more obvious in the current polarized culture than ever before. Everybody’s wrong about something; and if there were one exception to that rule, we would have no reliable way to determine who it was.

Rationalism, then, is self-defeating.

Reason, like all of God’s other gracious gifts, is great, but it makes a lousy god.

Paul tells us that “The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1Co 1.25). In other words, on his worst day, God is better than the best of us on our best day in both wisdom and strength.

And God doesn’t have any bad days.

This simple fact yields at least three consequences. I’ll note the first two in this post.

First, arguments raised against God are predominantly weak.

I’ve commented before on the weakness of most charges of contradiction in the Scripture. I’ll confess that I find it difficult not to shake my head when I hear yet another young scholar repeat as breaking news the old allegation that the Bible is “filled with contradictions.” Those who can supply an example or two when asked—and that’s a minority—typically raise objections that are just laughable, such as the biblical comments that God is both a God of peace and a God of war (that’s a round character, and the same young scholars love them when they show up in popular movies), or that Leviticus calls bats birds (it doesn’t).

I’m not saying that there aren’t tough questions; there certainly are, and I’ll get to them in a moment. But it’s remarkable to me how many bright people who view logic as the greatest authority don’t see the logical problems in their own charges against the Scripture.

Second, because our minds aren’t good at understanding infinity, which is an essential attribute of God, we’re often going to run into things that puzzle us—things that we’re not mentally equipped to comprehend.

Let me note something simple about this phenomenon.

It’s exactly what we should expect if there’s really an infinite God.

A common critical view is that religion is something that evolving humans developed in an attempt to make sense of the world, and probably to give themselves power over rival tribes. The Bible, like all other holy books, is just folk tales, interesting in the study of the history of religions but not true, and most certainly not authoritative.

But that doesn’t square with the data.

If we had made this god up, would we have included things that we can’t figure out? things that would encourage rationalists to reject such a god altogether? On the other hand, if such a God really exists, wouldn’t we expect that he would regularly step beyond the horizon of our understanding and leave us shaking our heads in puzzlement?

I would submit that the existence of these perplexities is a feature, not a bug. This is a reassuring thing, not something that should lead to apostasy.

There’s more to be said. Next time.

Part 3: Trusting Your Friends

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

On Valentine’s Day

by 1 Comment

This a time for romance. For love. For commitment. For loyalty.

Interestingly, God describes his relationship with his people in those terms.

We know that “God is love” (1Jn 4.8, 16)—that he has always been in relationship among the persons of the Godhead; he has never been alone. Love is natural for him; it’s part of who he is.

We know that “we love him because he first loved us” (1Jn 4.19)—that he initiated the relationship with us, even though we had wronged him (Ro 3.23). In fact, he lovingly anticipated that relationship before we even existed—before the earth itself existed (Ep 1.4).

We know that his most oft-repeated description of himself includes “lovingkindness” (Heb hesed), a far-reaching word not captured by any single English word, but including loving loyalty to a covenant relationship. It’s the attribute that keeps 60-year marriages together in spite of everything.

That’s the kind of relationship God wants with us.

We can imagine, then, how our sin must grieve his heart. In fact, he describes the sin of his people as adultery, violation of the marriage relationship.

I’ve been a believer for more than 60 years. Every day of those 60 years, I have fallen short of the glory of God. I’ve been unfaithful to the relationship.

That’s over 22,000 days of adultery.

How many would it take for you to give up on your spouse?

Yet God continues to welcome us back, to forgive our unfaithfulness, to restore the relationship.

Hesed.

God illustrates his love for us in a couple of stories he tells his people. One is in the book of Hosea, where he tells the prophet to marry a woman who will be unfaithful to him—as Israel has been unfaithful to their God.

It’s heartbreaking.

There’s another story, a less-well-known one, in Ezekiel 16.

Ezekiel is writing long after Hosea—so long, in fact, that Judah has now gone into captivity in Babylon, and Ezekiel is prophesying to them in the Jewish community there. He speaks God’s words to the community—

  • One day God found an abandoned baby by the side of the road, newborn, unwashed, unwanted. He took her home and cleaned her up, and then he began to provide for her needs: food, clothing, shelter. For years he raised her—lavishly—as his own daughter.
  • When she became an adult, a beautiful woman, his love for her led him to take her as his wife.
  • But she was unfaithful. She went after other lovers, not merely being seduced by them but seducing them, and aggressively. She pressured them; she even paid them. She made Sodom seem mild by comparison. She broke his heart.

What a horrifying account.

But it doesn’t end in divorce, or retaliation, or expulsion, or murder, or any of the things we would expect from a human relationship of this sort.

It ends in restoration, reunification, love.

And not because the unfaithful wife pleads for forgiveness.

Because the maltreated Husband remembers and is faithful to the marriage covenant, to the permanence of the relationship:

60 Nevertheless, I will remember My covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you. 61 … . 62 Thus I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord (Ezk 16.60, 62).

O wondrous love that will not let me go,
I cling to You with all my strength and soul;
Yet if my hold should ever fail
This wondrous love will never let me go!
(Steve and Vikki Cook)

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Dealing with Doubt, Part 1: The Joy of Doubting

by 1 Comment

Do you ever doubt your beliefs?

The fact is that we all do. We doubt the little things, and sometimes we doubt the big things. The really, really big things.

I’ve written before about an experience I had while in seminary, when I doubted the Biggest Thing Ever—whether there’s a God, and whether any of this is true.

Doubt is an important part of growing up. There comes a time in our maturation when we have to move beyond “that’s what I’ve always been taught” to “this is what I believe, for myself, with conviction; here I stand; I can do no other.” If you never do this, you essentially remain a child, at the mercy of those who want you to remain a child even though you’re an adult. And that, my friend, is profoundly unhealthy. Such a relationship is inevitably going to become abusive.

I deal with college students all day long. College age—whether you go to college or not—is the time when we transition into adulthood, when we ask hard questions about what we’ve always been taught and come to personal convictions about what we believe and how we will live. It’s the right time to work through those issues. Adulthood awaits.

But asking those questions can be scary. Where will I come out? Is there light at the end of the tunnel? For some people, the tunnel is darker than for others, and it can generate a fair amount of fear. When I was doubting—when I didn’t know how it would all turn out—I was deeply unsettled.

But I can say most assuredly that I am better for having doubted, for having gone through the unsettling experience. One reason is that beliefs that are never tested are never proved. Another reason is that working out your convictions makes them, and you, stronger. Yet another reason is that I have stories to encourage younger brothers and sisters who are now in that growth process. I’m profoundly grateful that I have had, and progressed through, that period of doubt.

Something I learned from the experience is that in thinking through what we’ve been taught, we’re often biased toward rejecting it, for several reasons.

  • Familiarity breeds contempt, even when the contempt is undeserved. Add to that the fact that you know where the bodies are buried in the landscape of your life: you’ve seen sin and failure and hypocrisy in people who participated in your upbringing—parents, siblings, teachers, pastors. That’s the inevitable result of living in a broken world, but it nonetheless inclines you to reject where you came from. The problem is that there may well be a baby in that bathwater.
  • The grass seems greener on the other side of the fence. There’s as much imperfection over there as you experienced in your upbringing—it’s a broken world, remember—but you haven’t experienced that, and everything looks fresh and new and exciting over there.
  • I’ve used trite maxims in the previous two points, so I’ll avoid that on this one. We live in an increasingly unstable culture. The pace of cultural philosophy, like the news cycle, is accelerating, and there’s considerable social pressure to throw out the old and embrace the new. If you toss it all, you’ll get instant affirmation and support from many quarters.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t throw out some of the things we were taught. In fact, by saying that we live in a broken world, I’ve implied just the opposite. I was taught things that I haven’t retained as an adult, and undoubtedly we all should have a similar experience. But I am saying that as you make those decisions, good and necessary decisions, you’ll be inclined to throw out things that you shouldn’t. You need to proceed carefully, thoughtfully, intentionally, rather than just chucking everything.

As I walked that path, I learned some principles that I found helpful in evaluating what to keep and what to toss. I’d like to take a few posts to share them with you.

Part 2: The Limits of Logic | Part 3: Trusting Your Friends

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Incomprehensible Faith

by 1 Comment

In my Bible study plan I’m always doing a deep dive on a section of Scripture. For the first three months of this year, I’m studying Ruth. I return to the book every day, studying it from multiple perspectives and reading. A lot.

A few days ago I thought of something that I’d never noticed before, after all these years of hearing and reading the story dozens of times. It’s something about the first major incident in the book.

We all know the story. Naomi and her husband move from Bethlehem—the house of bread—to Moab because of a famine. Their two sons marry Moabite women, and then all three men die. In the culture of that day, a childless widow is in very serious danger of starving to death. Naomi hears that the famine is over back in Bethlehem and decides to return—likely because she has family there who will be legally obligated to help her.

So far the story is pretty simple. But it’s complicated by the fact that one of her Moabite daughters-in-law, Ruth, wants to return with her.

Naomi argues against it, citing the obvious practical fact that Ruth is more likely to find a second husband in her own land. Naomi doesn’t mention the fact that the Moabites and the Israelites are enemies; the king of Moab had hired the prophet Balaam to curse Israel (Nu 22.4-5), and God had consequently cursed the king and his people (Nu 24.17). Surely Ruth’s marital prospects would be better in Moab.

But Ruth insists. She will go with Naomi; she will live with Naomi; she will adopt her people and culture; and she will worship her God (Ru 1.16)—for the rest of her life (Ru 1.17).

Why?

Look at this from Ruth’s perspective. The conventional wisdom in her day is that every ethnic group has its own god. Chemosh is the god of the Moabites—and their harvests are so plentiful that Yahweh’s people are coming over there to get a piece of the action. In all of Ruth’s experience to this point, she has seen nothing that would convince her that Yahweh cares for his people, or even that he is good. His people are starving, so Chemosh feeds them. Her father-in-law dies in Moab, as do his two sons, including Ruth’s husband, and all of them allegedly under the care of this tribal god Yahweh—who, to make matters worse, has placed her and her people under a specific curse.

Why seek shelter under the wings of such a god? What has he ever done for his own people, let alone an enemy?

Was it Naomi’s love for and trust in her own god? Well, she believes that her god, Yahweh, has taken someone who was full and has left her empty. A few days from now she will tell her own people no longer to call her by her name, Naomi, which means “pleasant.” Instead, she will say, call me Mara—“bitter.” My god has not been good to me.

So why does Ruth go with Naomi? And especially, why does she seek to worship Naomi’s god?

Well, for all her imperfections, Naomi does recognize that God is in charge. (And here I begin to capitalize the word again.) It is he who has brought food back to Bethlehem (Ru 1.6). It is he, not Chemosh, who she confidently believes will prosper the lives of her daughters-in-law (Ru 1.8-9). Even though his hand has gone out against her (Ru 1.13), she still believes that he is strong enough to bless, and she prays that he will. You don’t pray to someone you don’t believe in.

Apparently, Ruth sees in Naomi’s imperfect faith something greater than what she sees in the worshippers of her tribal god. For all of the trouble, for all of the pain, this is a God worth following—even at the cost of leaving home, family, culture, and language to go to a land where you’re under a curse, where you will likely face deep, overt, and lifelong discrimination.

So she goes.

And she finds that her faith is richly rewarded. This Yahweh, she finds, does indeed direct circumstances, even down to the portion of the community field where she happens to go looking for loose grain lying on the ground or standing beyond the reaches of the reapers’ sickles around the edges.

This is a God worth trusting. Worth following.

No matter what.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 5: Closing Thoughts

by Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC

There are other things we learn about the Creator by observing his creation. I’ve written before about a number of implications from the fact that God is our Creator. Here I’ll mention a couple of related thoughts in closing.

First, we know almost instinctively that when someone makes something, he gets to decide what to do with it. My father was skilled with his hands, and when I was a boy he made a workbench that he intended to use for working on automobile engines. The surface consisted of a long row of 2 x 4 beams turned sideways, so that the tabletop was 4” thick. As it turned out, I don’t remember him ever using it to work on engines; he did other things with it. He’s allowed to do that. It’s his table; he made it.

Similarly, the Creator has the right to govern his creation. We call that sovereignty. What he says goes.

Now, we’ve already established that he is powerful—able to do what he decides to do—and wise—able to determine the most effective uses of what he has created. We’ve also noted that he’s good; he doesn’t abuse any element of his creation, most especially us, but rather cares for us. I’ve written elsewhere about that fact that everything we really need is free.

All this means that his sovereignty over creation is no threat to us—unless we foolishly decide that we know better than he does. And unfortunately, the tendency to do that is part of our fallen nature.

A second thought derives naturally from the first. We ought to respect the Creator’s wisdom and follow his direction. Again, I’ve developed this idea elsewhere. You can use a chainsaw any old way you like, but if you reject the engineer’s recommendations for safe and proper use, don’t be surprised if you end up getting hurt.

Some years ago I recall seeing a commercial for Sherwin-Williams paint. The video began with a shot of the space shuttle on the launch pad, with a voiceover saying, “Sherwin Williams designed the paint for the space shuttle.” Then you heard the countdown, and at “Liftoff!” the screen went white as the exhaust from the solid rocket boosters obliterated the view of everything else, and the roar of those engines drowned out the voice. Then the image changed to a different kind of white, and as the camera zoomed out, you realized you were looking at a door. It opened away from you, and you saw a typical residential bathroom. Against the quiet, the voiceover said, “Chances are we can handle your bathroom.”

When I consider God’s heavens, the work of his fingers, I am driven to a simple confidence. He can handle my life: needs, wants, questions, doubts, sins, perplexities, griefs, all of it. I can trust his wisdom, his power, his goodness, for all that lies ahead, just as for all that he has brought me graciously through.

And, by his grace, I will.

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 4: TLC

by Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience

There’s something else we learn by observing creation carefully. Despite its brokenness, it seems to fit our needs just perfectly.

Our planet is in the solar system’s “Goldilocks zone”: like the fabled baby bear’s porridge, it’s “not too hot, not too cold—just right!” Further, the temperature is finely tuned by the planet’s slant on its axis, which gives most of the inhabited areas seasons—whether 4 or 2—and furthers the thriving of plant and animal life. And unlike its sister planet Mars, ours has an atmosphere, an ocean of air, with just the right amount of oxygen to support human and animal life, and just the right amount of nitrogen to keep the oxygen from causing us to burst into flame at inopportune moments. (And from what I’m told, all moments are inopportune for that.)

The balance of the biosphere is a remarkable thing; as we breath oxygen, we exhale carbon dioxide, which the plants use to produce more oxygen. Helpful little critters, no?

And it turns out that the sun that warms us and lights our days is also something of an enemy; it sends out radiation at levels that are harmful to us from even more than 90 million miles away. But invisibly surrounding our planet are streams of charged particles, driven from the sun but held in place around us by the planet’s magnetic field, that serve as a shield to divert the lethal levels of that radiation away from us.

Let’s see; what else?

Well, areas of the planet feel really crowded, and sometimes folks in those areas wish there were more land. I grew up in the West, “big sky country,” where we didn’t feel that pressure so much—and preferred it that way. I note that the planet’s average density of humans per square mile is just over 39—though of course, much of the planet’s land surface is uninhabitable (think Antarctica) or nearly so (think Sahara). But the Creator was being kind to limit the extent of the land mass, because the rest of the surface—ocean—is a gigantic water purification system that collects, distills, and then delivers drinkable water right to our feet.

Now, our environment’s not perfect. I mentioned a few words back that the system is broken. Lions choke wildebeests to death—I’ve seen it happen, up close and personal—without mercy and without apparent regret. Some people are inclined to focus on the brokenness; Jack London made a living writing stories about a nature that was “red in tooth and claw.” I think it’s important to note the brokenness, first, for our own preservation, and second, for evaluating the brokenness that we’re causing and then remedying it. After all, the Creator has made us responsible for the care and preservation of the planet as well as its wise use.

But the obvious brokenness makes creation’s general kindness all the more impressive. We deal everyday with things, creations of fellow humans, that don’t work at all when any little thing goes wrong. That’s why so many people make such good money repairing and maintaining expensive systems.

But creation just keeps doing what it does so well—supporting life. It amazes me how desperately life wants to continue. You can be out in the middle of a lava field, and there’s a little weed growing up through a crack, clinging to a few grains of something resembling dirt, raising its tiny leaves to the sky and soaking up the sun, yearning to grow.

Of course it’s true that by foolish mismanagement we humans can interfere with the Creator’s systems and make life difficult or even impossible (think Chernobyl). But it really is astonishing that a system so complex continues to support life after millennia of inattention or even abuse.

Whoever made all this must really, really like us.

Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator (1P 4.19).

Part 5: Closing Thoughts

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 3: Omniscience

by Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence

The second thing that I notice when I study the cosmos is its complexity. Again, from the macroscopic to the microscopic level the universe is just unbelievably complex.

At the largest scale there are gravitational forces affecting everything—not just galaxies as they rotate, but galaxy clusters, and even the “great wall” macrostructures of galaxy clusters. Astronomers tell us that there isn’t enough visible matter—stars—in a galaxy to account for its rotation, and hence they postulate “dark matter” to account for it. We can see that the system is complex over unfathomable distances (boy, there’s an insufficient adjective if ever there was one), and invisibly so at that.

At the other end of the spectrum, quarks—several kinds of ‘em—and muons and fluons are doing their things at the minutest of scales, while electrons orbit, or populate shells, or something, and the strong nuclear force keeps all those protons in the nuclei from repelling one another, and the motions are frantic—and the elements appear to us to be pretty much standing still.

So is light a particle or a wave? And why not?

And we haven’t even talked about living things yet.

The more we learn about the cell, the more complicated we realize it is. And the DNA and RNA that it contains are equally complex, containing—and writing—instructions for all the characteristics that make one life form different from others, and from other examples of the same life form. Not to mention epigenetics.

(I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

One of my favorite examples of complexity is symbiosis—the mutually beneficial relationships between life forms. And my favorite one of those involves the termite.

As someone who has bought and sold a couple of houses, I’m no fan of termites. Pretty much all they do is eat. And they eat just one thing—wood. They’ll wreak havoc on the joists and other wooden components of your house—which is why you can’t sell a house without a “termite letter” from an inspector, confirming that there is no termite infestation in the house and that any damage from previous infestations has been properly repaired.

Interestingly, though, the termite’s digestive system is unable to digest cellulose—which is what wood is primarily made of. Which means that he could eat like a madman all day long and starve to death—his entire dietary intake would go right through him.

But as it happens, there live in the digestive tract of the termite a bunch of little microorganisms called flagellates. They excrete a substance that renders the cellulose digestible by the termite.

How fortunate.

But there’s more to the story.

The flagellate is anaerobic.

What does that mean?

It means he never exercises.

No. #dadjoke

It means that oxygen is toxic to him. If he’s exposed to the air, he dies.

So the flagellate keeps the termite alive, and the termite keeps the flagellate alive.

Now.

Which one of those little beasties do you suppose evolved first?

And it’s actually more complicated than that.

You see, both the termite and the flagellate reproduce sexually.

Without going into too much detail, that means that there has to be a boy flagellate and a girl flagellate. In the same place. At the same time. And they have to like each other.

Same with the termites.

And, of course, all four of them—actually much more than four—need to be together, because, as you recall, they’re keeping one another alive.

There are lots of other examples of symbiosis, little macrocosms that represent just a small picture of what the cosmos itself is—an infinitely complex system, in perfect balance, running smoothly for thousands of years, and so reliably that we can literally set our watches by it.

Whoever made this place must be really, really smart.

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? [there is] no searching of his understanding (Is 40.28).

Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 2: Omnipotence

by Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction

So what do we learn about the Creator by observing what he has created?

I’m not going to be picky about the order here—I suppose different people will notice different things at different times—but the one that jumps out at me first is power.

Whoever made this place must be really, really strong.

Philosophers note that effects have causes—that’s the basis for all science—and that the cause is typically greater—more comprehensive, more powerful, more something—than the effect.

Why do I start with strength? Because the cosmos is so big.

Unimaginably big.

The fastest any human being has ever traveled is just a hair under 25,000 mph. That was the crew of Apollo 10, returning to the earth from the moon. Now, suppose you start at the sun (I know, if you start at the sun you won’t get anywhere, because you’ll be incinerated. Work with me here.) and head outward at that speed.

  • If my math is right, you’ll reach Mercury in 60 days.
  • Venus in another 56.
  • Earth in 39 more.
  • Mars in 78 more.

By the way, this assumes that the planets are all lined up in a row, which they never are, and ignores Newtonian physics, which encourages rocket scientists to save fuel by using the gravitational forces of planets to accelerate a spacecraft by “slingshotting.” This means that your rockets will have to be firing all the time, and you could never carry that much fuel. But again, work with me.

So far this seems doable. But as you probably know, the distances start to increase outside Mars’s orbit.

  • Jupiter is 576 days more. 800 total so far. That’s between 2 and 3 years.
  • Saturn is another 700 days. Almost 2 additional years.
  • Uranus another 1500.
  • Neptune another 1650.

You’ve reached the edge of the solar system, in just 12 years and 9 months. And oh, my friend, you’re just getting started.

  • The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is another 115,333 years. I hope you brought a book.
  • The nearest edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is another 670.5 million years.
  • The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is another 53 billion years.
  • The edge of our “local” galaxy cluster is another 2.65 trillion years.
  • The edge of the observed universe is another 131 trillion years.

Now, we’ll see in a bit what the James Webb Space Telescope shows us. If the Lord tarries, I expect we’ll keep developing technology that allows us to see deeper into space, using various frequencies. And I also suspect there will always be more—that we’ll never come to the “edge” of it—whatever that means.

The sheer scope of the cosmos tells us of the power of its Creator.

Consider a different aspect.

The sun, they tell us, is an average-to-mediocre star. Yet it’s an 800,000-mile diameter ball of raging nuclear fusion, with a core temperature of 16 million degrees. (That’s Kelvin, but with these numbers the scale you use doesn’t really matter.) It shoots out flaming geysers of gas 200,000 miles high for hours at a time.

And if you took the most powerful power plant on earth and duplicated it 2.5 billion times, and collected all the power that army of plants generated in a year, it would equal the output of the sun in just 1 second.

Yikes.

There are lots of other evidences of the Creator’s power. I’ve stood on the “hurricane deck” at the foot of Niagara Falls and been nearly knocked to my knees by the power of the falling water—and there’s a bigger waterfall right next door.

I’ve stood at the edge of Victoria Falls (“the smoke that thunders”) in Zambia and placed my finger in the water, knowing that the precipice stretches across the Zambezi River for more than a mile.

Apparently Isaiah gave some thought to this concept:

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? (Is 40.28).

You don’t need a Bible to know that whoever did all this is really, really strong.

Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 1: Introduction

by Leave a Comment

The first thing God ever told us is that he’s the Creator. The main verb of the first sentence in the Bible is “created,” and “God” is the subject.

That’s the first thing. Not that he’s holy, not that he’s good, not that he’s infinite—though he is all of those things and much more.

He started by telling us that he’s the Creator (Ge 1.1). And he then continued by stating that everything we see in the cosmos—everything—is from his hand (Ge 1.2-31).

Given where I work, you won’t be surprised that I’m strongly committed to the primary authority of Scripture. My school’s creed starts with the line, “I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments.” I spend a lot of time thinking about, and teaching others to think about, what the Bible teaches about this or that. And “this or that” includes a LOT of things—I would say, in fact, that it includes everything we need to know about who God is, how we can know him, and then how we can serve him.

But the same Bible that I hold to be authoritative also says that it’s not the only place where can learn about God—or more precisely, it’s not the only form of divine revelation. The Bible famously says that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19.1) and that “the invisible things of [God] are clearly seen through the things that are made” (Ro 1.20). In other words, you can see what God has to say by just looking around.

Since God made everything, what he has made—like the artwork any artist produces—tells us something about him. You can learn a lot about Picasso by studying his paintings (he did have toxic relationships with women, now, didn’t he?), and no one reading Hemingway will be surprised that one day he walked out into the Idaho woods and ended his own life.

You learn about an artist by studying his art. You learn about the Creator by studying what he’s created.

By looking around.

Of course, what we’re looking around at—what the theologians call “general revelation”—isn’t in the same category as the Scripture, for a simple reason: it’s not exactly what God created. It’s busted.

Since sin entered creation through Adam, all kinds of things about it have changed—most obviously death has come upon us all, and pain of various kinds, and frustration, and who knows what else.

So we have to temper our conclusions about the Creator by deleting from the original design what’s changed since it was executed. If somebody splashes bright pink paint all over a Picasso, you don’t blame Pablo for it.

Although, in this case the bright pink paint might actually be an improvement—but no analogy is perfect, especially when it involves God, who is unlike anyone or anything else.

Anyway.

Even if we have no Bible, even if we’ve never seen one or even heard of one, we can learn about God by just looking around—at the heavens, at the earth, macroscopically or microscopically.

That book of revelation is infinite and inexhaustible.

The Scripture helps us by repeatedly referring back to Creation and drawing various theological points from it. Some years ago my colleague Bill Lovegrove suggested surveying the Scripture for all of those references and noting what conclusions the biblical writers themselves draw. I can commend that study to you as well.

What I’d like to do is spend a few posts dipping a toe in the shallow end of that pool.

Next time—so what do we learn by looking around?

Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

The Incomparable Christ

by Leave a Comment

We’re all thinking about the best way(s) to start off the New Year, and it occurs to me that for Christians, who are forever in Christ (Ro 8.1, 12.5; 1Co 1.30), it’s only sensible to begin the year with a meditation on him.

There are many biblical passages on which we could choose to meditate. One of my favorites is the opening paragraph of Hebrews. I’ve used it before as an indicator of the way God speaks, but it will serve well for this purpose too.

The point of Hebrews, as you probably know, is to demonstrate that the Hebrew Scriptures are fulfilled in Jesus, who is the climax of all that they anticipate. In just the opening sentence, the author tells us much about the greatness of Christ:

  • He is the heir to all of the Father’s authority (He 1.2).
  • He is the creator of all things (He 1.2).
  • He is the perfect expression of the nature of God (He 1.3).
  • Like the Father, He holds omnipotence in His very words (He 1.3).
  • He has cleansed us of all our sin debt (He 1.3).
  • He has finished His saving work and is now exalted in a position of honor in the heavenly throne room (He 1.3).

In the rest of the book, the author is going to demonstrate that Jesus is superior

  • in his person—
    • greater than the angels (He 1-2)
    • or even than Moses (He 3-4)
  • as well as in his work—
    • in the priesthood (He 5-7)
    • in the New Covenant (He 8-9)
    • and in the offering of himself as the perfect sacrifice (He 10)

The author spends the first chapter listing passages from the Hebrew Scriptures that demonstrate that Jesus is far superior to the angels—

  • Citing Psalm 2 and the Davidic Covenant in 2Samuel 7, he notes that Jesus is the Son (He 1.5), whereas the angels are commanded to worship him in Deuteronomy 32.43 (He 1.6).*
  • Angels are referred to as “servants” in Psalm 104.4 (He 1.7, 14), but the Son is described in much more elevated language in Psalm 45.6-7, Psalm 102.25-27, and Psalm 110.1 (He 1.8-13).
    • He holds lordship over the universe (He 1.8)—indeed, he holds lordship over the world yet to come (He 2.5-9)
    • He is unchanging (He 1.11-12).

In this connection it’s worth noting that while angels often announced God’s redemptive work –

  • Gabriel announced John the Baptist’s birth to Zacharias (Luke 1:13ff)
  • Gabriel announced Jesus’ birth to Mary (Luke 1:26ff)
  • An angel announced Jesus’ birth to Joseph (Matt. 1:20)
  • An angel announced Jesus’ birth to the shepherds (Luke 2:9ff)
  • An angel warned Joseph of the danger from Herod (Matt. 2:13)

… they never actually accomplished any of that work. That was all Christ’s—

  • Perfect obedience to the Law (Ro 5.19; He 4.15)
  • A perfectly atoning death as the Lamb of God (Ro 8.3)
  • His own resurrection and the consequent defeat of death (Jn 2.19, 21)**
  • His intercession for us in the heavenly throne room (He 9.24; Ro 8.34)

The Son, the Messiah, the uniquely Anointed One has proved himself not only sufficient, but superior in all the ways that matter. As we start into a new year, many of us with dread or at least apprehension, we can proceed confidently, knowing that our Forerunner has planned and prepared the way and determined the perfect outcome for his people.

The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven;
his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men (Ps 11.4).

* A textual variant has resulted in the cited material in He 1.6 not appearing in most English translations of Dt 32.43, but it’s there. That’s a really interesting story; maybe a post on it would be worthwhile.

** Of course, because of the unity of the Trinity, the Father (Ac 5.30, 10.40) and the Spirit (Ro 1.4, 8.11) are said to participate in Christ’s resurrection as well.

Photo by James on Unsplash