faith

On Uncertainty

March 23, 2020 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Unusual times.

For the first time in my lifetime, the entire globe is wrapped in complete, and admitted, uncertainty.

I suppose the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962 came close, but that lasted only 13 days, and I suspect that a lot of people in corners of the globe were unaware that it was happening at the time. Here in Greenville, where we lost one of our own, we still memorialize it.

But now we’re dealing with a virus, which isn’t open to dissuasion and is no respecter of persons, and which, for whatever reasons, is pretty much everywhere. Add to that the ubiquity of media information—informed and uninformed—and the fact that suddenly everyone’s an expert in epidemiology, and you have a perfect storm of uncertainty, and all the consequences that it brings.

Different cultures deal with uncertainty in different ways. The Germans and the Swiss are stereotyped as planners, regimented and orderly. (I’ve found that like all stereotypes, this one is far too simplistic.) In various developing countries, I’ve noticed that uncertainty comes with the territory; you live one day at a time, getting up early to carry in the day’s water, and then going to the market to get the day’s food. Whenever the infrastructure is unreliable, the residents get used to the power or water outages, or the torn-up highways, and the culture develops a sort of resignation that often results in considerably better mental health than, say, most Americans would manifest in similar circumstances. In fact, American tourists in those cultures are largely responsible for the “Ugly American” stereotype all too common overseas.

I was once teaching overseas when the power went out, killing my data projector and thus my PowerPoint. The students sprang into action; here came a generator out of nowhere, and within 5 minutes we were back in business, with no one seeming to think that anything out of the ordinary had happened.

Once I took a team of students to a location where the city-supplied water was out, with no word on when it would be restored. For the five weeks we were there, we trucked in water, hauled it to our quarters in 5-gallon plastic buckets, and did our daily ablutions from smaller buckets. One of the male students and I had an informal contest on how little water we needed to get completely lathered and rinsed. I got it down to a liter—but then, having no hair gave me an unfair advantage.

My culture isn’t used to this sort of thing. Here in the early days of “social distancing,” we seem to be responding with creativity, helpfulness, and even amusement, from the looks of the memes—excepting the hoarders, of course. But as the situation drags on—it will drag on, won’t it? Or are we uncertain about that too?—anxiety increases, and it’s not unfounded. Lives are at risk; jobs are at risk; the economy is at risk—and the list could go on.

The situation doesn’t call for platitudes or for Pollyanna—or certainly not the cavalier dismissal of genuine threats. This is a time for us to pay attention, to care for one another, to sacrifice. It’s not a time to make light of other people’s suffering.

But it is a time for reflection on First Things, on Prime Principles. On what is certain. On Truth.

It is True—

That there is a God in heaven, who is great and good, and whose will is always done.
That there is abundant evidence throughout history and revelation of the truth of the first point.
That we cannot control the forces of nature as we would like.
That God has given us stewardship of this earth, however, and that consequently we should marshal all our knowledge and skills to protect life—our own and all others.
That in difficulty, with certain outcome or not, we must trust the goodness and greatness of our loving Creator: “Man’s steps are ordained by the Lord; how then can man understand his way?” (Prov 20.24).
That there is much, much more than this life.

And since these things are True, how do we proceed?

With confidence.

With care.

And with attention to the most important things.

Most of us have more time these days than we usually do, since we’re not going to work.

Use it—not for binge-watching whatever, but for loving God, for loving your neighbor, for doing justice, for loving mercy, for walking humbly with your God.

There is a good and wise outcome.

Certainly.

Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

“No Peeking!”

December 16, 2019 by Dan Olinger

When I arrived home after work one evening, one of my daughters, who was perhaps three or four years old at the time, met me at the door with delightful words.

“Daddy! I have something to show you! Take my hand, and close your eyes, and no peeking!”

So I took her hand and (mostly) closed my eyes and let her lead me through the house to show me the surprise she had prepared for me.

All these years later, I don’t remember what the surprise was. I’m sure it was one of those things that, in truth, is a bigger deal in the eyes of the child than in the eyes of the parent. I do recall keeping one eye slightly slitted open, because I was pretty sure that she wasn’t thinking about doorframes, and I didn’t want to get knocked out.

Now, why did she want me to close my eyes? Because even at her young age, she knew that joy is heightened by surprise, and surprise is intensified by anticipation. And why did I go along with her? Because I know and love her; because I trusted her to lead me to something good; and because I wanted her to enjoy seeing my joy when the surprise was unveiled.

Sometimes God meets us at the door, so to speak, and he asks us to take his hand, and close our eyes, and “No peeking!”

Most of us respond to that by drawing back and saying, “What? Where are you taking me? Is this gonna hurt?”

Don’t we know him? Don’t we trust him? Do we think he’s going to run us into a doorframe?

How hurtful do you suppose that is to him?

Why do we insist on seeing where he’s taking us?

He doesn’t hide the future from us to frighten us, or to disguise some evil and hurtful thing he has planned for us. He hides the future from us because he loves us—because he wants us to know the increased joy of anticipation and, eventually, revelation of the great things he has prepared for us, in both this life and the life to come.

And we should go along with him, not complaining and not asking accusatory questions, because we know him, because we trust him, and because we want him to enjoy seeing our joy when the surprise is unveiled.

When my daughter said, “OK, Daddy, open your eyes!” I looked first at the surprise—but then I looked immediately at her face, because I wanted to see her joy at my joy. That’s a priceless experience, to see unrestrained joy in the face of someone you love.

Instead of worrying about where God may be taking us—and deeply hurting him in the process—we should prepare to see his face and the joy that we have placed there by simply taking his hand, closing our eyes, and not peeking.

Photo by Nourdine Diouane on Unsplash

The Gifts of Salvation, Part 10: Faith

April 18, 2019 by Dan Olinger

Introduction
Our relationship to sin: Conviction / Repentance / Regeneration / Forgiveness / Redemption / Justification
Our relationship to God:
Before conversion: Election / Drawing / Faith
At conversion: Reconciliation / Positional sanctification / Adoption / Union with Christ / Spirit Baptism / Sealing / Indwelling / Assurance
After conversion: Progressive sanctification / Filling / Glorification
Conclusion

At some point in God’s drawing of us to himself—some people take longer than others—our mind changes. We begin to think differently about our own situation, especially about our desire for a relationship with God. We call that change “conversion,” and it’s the precise moment we’re referring to when we talk about “getting saved” or “coming to Jesus.”

In its simplest sense, conversion is simply turning. We speak of currency conversion as “turning dollars into shillings” (or whatever) when we travel. Using more physical language, at conversion we turn away from our sin—we’ve talked about that as “repentance”—and in the same action we turn toward Christ. It’s as though our sin is standing on our left, and Christ is standing on our right, and we simply turn from one to the other. The turning away from sin, as just noted, we call “repentance,” and the turning to Christ we call “faith.”

So conversion is a single act that includes both repentance and faith. In repentance we leave our old relationship with sin, and in faith we enter a new relationship with Christ.

That’s the moment when it all happens.

I think we complicate faith. We know what it’s like to turn away from one thing and turn toward something else. It’s both an intellectual and an emotional shift; because we don’t trust the old thing—it doesn’t satisfy us—we don’t want it anymore, and we turn toward something that we believe will help us. We trust it, and we’re willing to depend on it.

In this case, we believe that Jesus can solve our problem—forgive our sin—and we are ready to depend on him to do what he is capable of.

Because that’s not complicated, you don’t have to be very smart to do it.

How much do you have to know in order to trust Christ?

Do you have to know about and believe in the virgin birth?

No.

(Bear with me here.)

I’m guessing that most of us didn’t know what a virgin birth even was when we came to Jesus. We thought the Christmas carol was about some guy named “Round John Virgin.” Fortunately for us, you don’t have to assent to a whole list of complicated theological truths—and because God is infinite, truths about him are indeed complicated—in order to have him rescue you. Even a child—especially a child—can come to Jesus (Mk 10.14). Just trust him. Anybody can do that.

Now let me mollify some of my readers with the necessary disclaimer.

A believer will believe. He will know his Master’s voice (Jn 10.3, 4, 14). He will hear and believe the Word. And when in his Christian experience he learns that Jesus was born of a virgin, he will certainly believe it. No one who denies the virgin birth is a follower of the Shepherd.

But that comes later. At the beginning, in a simple act of trust, you just turn to Jesus.

Is it “blind faith”?

Hardly.

Is a marriage “blind faith”? Of course not—unless you’re a Moonie, perhaps.

When you marry someone, you do so based on shared experiences that have convinced you that this person is a worthwhile partner. Twenty years down the road, you’ll realize that you really didn’t know each other at all when you got married, but you can hardly say that your trust in your bride or groom was “blind faith.” There was a basis for your decision.

And there is a basis for this one. For millennia, this God has been proving himself faithful. We have been demonstrating ourselves faithless and brainless, in desperate need of rescue.

So trust him.

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Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 4: Naked Emperors

August 17, 2017 by Dan Olinger

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I’ve argued (Part 3) that the Bible is a coherent work of literature. But that’s obviously not true if it contradicts itself. You can find all kinds of collections of supposed biblical contradictions; there’s a well-designed site that lists 140 of them, and the Skeptics Annotated Bible identifies 496.

I’ve studied this topic for many years, and the more of these charges I read, the less I think of them. In fact, the great majority—I’m talking 98 or 99%–are just silly. I don’t have the space to prove that here, but I’d like to engage in a little exercise that will get us started in that direction.

For many years, if you Googled^TM “contradictions in the Bible,” you’d get first a link to a list of 69 errors compiled by Jim Meritt. (The site owners have since taken it down, for reasons that will become obvious in a minute.) If you don’t know all the details of how something gets to be the first hit in Google, in brief it’s an indication that the internet community has decided, by linking to it, that it’s the most valuable resource available on the topic.

Since Meritt’s list was #1 for years, I went to the trouble of evaluating it in depth and compiled this summary. His work is now gone and replaced with this list of 332 alleged contradictions, largely harvested from the Skeptics Annotated Bible, but the principles we’ll note today still very much apply.

When skeptics allege a contradiction in the Bible, they’re pretty much always making at least one of eight very basic scholarly errors. Let me identify them and give an example of each.

1. Depending on an English Translation

No orthodox Christians teach that any translation of the Bible is inspired; inspiration, and thus inerrancy, apply only to the original writings. So when Luke says that the men with Paul heard the voice of Jesus from heaven (Acts 9.7), and Paul later tells the mob in Jerusalem that they didn’t (Acts 22.9), some English translations fail to make obvious a very clear distinction in the Greek—that the men heard the sound of the voice but could not understand the message. Now, a skeptic can be forgiven for being misled by a translation, but he should not get away with making scholarly judgments when he doesn’t even have the basic tools (knowledge of the biblical languages) to speak to the question.

2. Transcription Errors

The manuscripts from which modern Bibles are translated were copies made by hand from older copies. They contain copying errors; no one denies this, and there’s an entire discipline (textual criticism) that devotes itself to dealing with them. (And by the way, that’s not a problem for us—but that’s a subject for another post.) So when 1Kings 4.26 says that Solomon had 40,000 horse stalls, and 2Chr 9.25 says he had 4,000, that’s not an error in the original; it’s clearly a copying error.

3. Not Paying Attention

Any work of literature contains details, and readers are supposed to notice them. Gen 7.9 says that all the animals went into the ark in pairs. Back in Gen 7.2, we find that God told Noah to take 7 of each kind of clean animal—obviously, so he’d have extras for eating and sacrificing. Verse 9 doesn’t contradict that; there were 2 of all animals, and 7 of just the clean ones.

4. Not Paying Attention to Context

In 1Co 2.15, Paul says that the spiritual person judges all things; in context he’s talking about discerning what the Spirit teaches to those whom he indwells. In 1Co 4.5 he tells the Corinthians not to judge—that is, not to make decisions “before the time,” or without having complete information. The context of each statement makes it clear that they do not contradict.

5. Cultural Ignorance

The Bible is the literary product of another time and place. When we interpret it, we need to understand how the people of that time and place would have spoken or written. For example, Paul speaks of “The Twelve” apostles (1Co 15.5) after Judas’s suicide, when there would have been only 11. But it’s clear in the NT that the body of the apostles was routinely called “The Twelve”; and Peter’s statement in Acts 1.20-22 that the missing Judas must be replaced helps verify that.

6. Childish Literalism

Literature uses metaphor routinely. But skeptics often read such metaphors like Amelia Bedelia—perhaps because they think that’s how we read them. (It isn’t.) So God tells the serpent that he will eat dust (Gen 3.14), and the critic says that’s a scientific error. Um, no. When a drag racer looks in his rear-view mirror and shouts, “Eat my dust!” he’s not making nutritional recommendations.

7. Eyewitness Perspective

When two eyewitnesses report an event, they notice and thus report different things. (Investigators will tell you that if two suspects report exactly the same details about an accusation, they’ve probably concocted the story.) So when Matthew, Luke, and John report that the rooster crowed after Peter’s denial, and Mark reports that he crowed twice, that’s not a contradiction. In fact, since Mark is reporting Peter’s perspective, and Peter was the only disciple there, it’s likely that the other 3 are just summarizing what Peter had told them.

8. Roundness of Character

Good literature celebrates the fact that people are complicated. Is God a God of war (Ex 15.3) or a God of peace (Rom 15.33)? Well, it kinda depends on where you stand with him. That’s not a contradiction; it’s a round character, and we learned about those back in ninth-grade English, when somebody apparently wasn’t paying attention.

An objective analysis of these passages makes it clear that not only are they not contradictions, they’re not even reasonably problematic. And usually the people making the charges don’t know enough about the subject even to be addressing it.

That said, there are some difficult passages in the Bible; there are statements that we don’t have enough information to evaluate with certainty. What about those?

In the past, some of the thorniest questions—writing in the time of Moses, and the existence of the Hittites, for example—were answered as further information came to light from archaeology and other sources. Undoubtedly more questions will be answered as the Lord tarries.

But what if they aren’t?

Let me suggest that it’s not naïve or unscholarly to trust your friends. I trust my wife because I know her; we have a basis for trust. I trust God and his Word for the same reason. That’s not blind faith; it’s how healthy relationships work.

So for the things in God’s Word that we don’t understand, we wait, and we trust.

And for the things we do, we obey, and we worship.

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8