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 Sloth

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Since my previous post was on doing less and thereby getting enough sleep, I suppose I should balance it to keep folks out of the ditch on the other side of the road.

Life is about stewardship. We’re given abilities and responsibilities by the Lord’s providence, and he holds us accountable for how diligently we carry out those tasks. My assumption in the previous post was that we do better when we have enough sleep; I’ve learned that from long experience, and so, I suspect, have you. Sleeping, then, is a stewardship responsibility, and we should adjust our commitments to allow for enough of it.

But rest and recuperation are not laziness, and the same principle of stewardship is no call for us to lie around doing as little as possible; it calls for us to use our waking hours, which are limited, to the best and most efficient purpose. When we wake up, we should get going—since we’ve gotten enough sleep—and use the day wisely. Maybe that means taking care of other people—little ones, perhaps, or disabled ones—or producing things—shoes or artwork or widgets. Maybe it’s playing a part in a process, through meetings or paperwork or organization. Your mind’s well rested, and you jump in and give it all you’ve got.

Part of stewardship, I suppose, is doing your best to devote yourself to tasks that you’re good at. Some people absolutely thrive on an assembly line; others would go insane working any kind of a regular schedule. Different folks, different strokes. God made us all different, and we really should celebrate all kinds of diversity. (And no, that phrase is not redundant.)

Not everybody can get a job that’s a good match for his skills. Sometimes you just have to take the job you can get. How do you steward that? By diligence, of course—being on time, doing what you’re told, working hard (and if you do those three things, you’re ahead of 90% of the workforce, it seems). By learning all you can about your responsibilities, to make up for lack of natural ability. By finding your joy in God’s empowerment to do well the things that don’t come naturally to you.

Over the years I’ve worked a lot of different jobs—custodial, food service, retail, security, facilities management, writing, publishing (with some marketing and sales along the way), and now teaching. I feel most qualified for what I’m doing now—for which I’m grateful—but I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed all the jobs I’ve had, and I’ve benefited from all of them beyond just the paycheck.

Our culture has come to view work as something you do to pay for the stuff you really want to do—whether it’s partying on the weekends, or summer vacations, or retirement. That’s a shame. We’re much healthier psychologically when we’re given to a mission, especially one that’s bigger than we are. We’re designed to spend our time making a difference, in ways great and small.

An even worse trend in our culture is to come home from work, fall onto the couch, and watch entertainment for the rest of the night. We’ve conditioned ourselves to sit passively for hours on end, even to the point where we’ll give up sleep for it. How profoundly unhealthy, both physically and spiritually.

When she was in early elementary school, one of my daughters observed that if she watched TV for a long time, she felt sad—she was happier when she was up and about and accomplishing things (though I don’t think she knew the word accomplishing at the time).

She was right; I’m glad she learned that lesson so young.

We’re made to accomplish things—different things, in different ways, certainly, but accomplishments all.

If you haven’t though about that lately, why not sit yourself down and spend a little time thinking about what you’re good at (it’s probably the same as what you love) and how you can invest in that activity for the good of others?

Photo by Stephen Tafra on Unsplash

On Sleep

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Some years ago I decided to adopt a lifestyle that prioritized getting enough sleep. Decades later, I’m more confident every day that it was the right choice.

When you’re a kid, staying up late is an adventure, a chance to live as the grown-ups do. Most parents have entertained themselves by occasionally telling a child that tonight he can stay up as late as he wants, and then watching him drop off to sleep on the couch not long after his regular bedtime.

Eventually, we get old enough to succeed at staying up late. Most high-schoolers will attend a school-sponsored event that lasts all night, perhaps a lock-in with basketball in the school gym and lots of those snacks that will kill you when you’re older. I can clearly recall coming home from one of those around 6 or 7 am and walking wordlessly past my waiting Mom and straight to bed.

In college, and especially grad school, all-nighters are a standard tactic. I took one course in seminary that required a long, detailed expository sermon outline every Friday, and many students had a regular ritual where they’d each check out the maximum allowed number of books from the library and gather in someone’s apartment to pool their resources and clatter away at their typewriters all night long. Sometimes the all-nighters were a consequence of poor time management during the day, but not always. I’ve had students, both undergrad and graduate, who were married, with kids, working full-time jobs and carrying a full academic load, and I don’t know how they did it.

Once we enter into our post-school life, the old habits die hard. Those of us with 8-to-5 jobs still feel like staying up until midnight just because that’s what we do. When children come along, there’s the sleep deprivation that comes from overnight feeding and miscellaneous wakefulness. When that phase of life is over, we stay up to stream TV or movies or lounge through social media.

And we’re tired. We need an alarm clock—maybe several alarm clocks—to get up, and then coffee, and during the workday more coffee, and dozing through those after-lunch meetings.

I decided that that life wasn’t for me.

These days I’m usually in bed by 10 and up by 6, which gives me time in the morning for devotions and ablutions and some time in the office to sort out priorities for the day ahead. That gives me 8 hours a night, and after doing that for a while I find I don’t need an alarm clock, and the fact that I can’t use caffeine doesn’t interfere with my ability to meet my responsibilities. I wake up awake.

I referred to this approach as a “lifestyle.” By that I mean that it involves more than just going to bed earlier. If you want to go to bed earlier, there are some other things that have to happen.

Most obviously, I’ve found that I need to get less busy. And that means taking on fewer responsibilities.

Now, some responsibilities are mandated.

  • I’m a husband, and I need to spend time with my wife.
  • I’m a father, and even though my children are now grown and out of the house, I need to interact with them.
  • I have a job, and the responsibilities there are significant. My classes meet at a certain time, on certain days, and I have to be there, and I have to have something prepared. I’ve seen to it that my job responsibilities can be completed in the normal 40-hour work week, and beyond that I turn down extra responsibilities if I can. I rarely if ever take work home.
  • Church is not optional. I’m faithful there, and I do more than just attend, but I don’t offer to help with everything. I try to do one thing well, rather than a little bit of everything.

I know that for some people this studied approach to life is simply not possible. Financial or medical or family responsibilities take all the time you have. I experienced that when I was my father’s caregiver for the last 5+ years of his life. I can tell you that those exhausting seasons are temporary.

But for those of you streaming entire seasons of zombies at night and then living as zombies through the day, there’s a better set of priorities.

Photo by Cris Saur 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

Created. Now What? Part 4: Dominion

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Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

If the first takeaway from creation theology is that we’re all, male and female, in the image of God, despite our sinfulness and our damaged state, then we ought to figure out what that means.

What is the image of God, anyway?

I think the first hint toward an answer is in the text itself. As God meditates on what he’s going to do (Gen 1.26), and as Moses then describes what God did (Gen 1.28), the text emphasizes a single point: Adam is to have dominion “over all the earth,” including “every living thing that moves on the earth.” He is to fill the earth with descendants of himself (Gen 1.28), and these humans are to “subdue” the earth in their dominion over it.

So what’s that mean?

Several things:

  • God has given us responsibility for the state of the earth. We’re going to be accountable for how we use it. It’s not our playground; it’s our responsibility. That means we need to use it wisely and, dare I say it, sustainably. We should use our non-renewable resources with a view toward how long they’ll last at the current rate of use. We should prefer renewable resources wherever possible—and we should carefully think through what “possible” means, in both practical and financial terms. We should develop smart ways to conserve and extend what’s on and in the earth. Avoidable extinctions shouldn’t happen on our watch. We’re not drunken sailors—or we shouldn’t be.
  • And with the responsibility to use the earth wisely is the clear right to use it. Its resources are for our use, within the bounds of stewardship. We can harness the power of its energy sources; we can use our intelligence to make plants more productive or more useful in other ways (natural isn’t necessarily a more moral descriptor); we can domesticate animals and use them for work or for food, even as we care for them and seek their prosperity (Prov 12.10). We can kill them, but we do so humanely and only as needed.

And that brings other issues to consider:

  • Are there limits to this dominion? Selective breeding? Hybridization? Genetic manipulation? Cloning? What about cloning humans? Does that cross a line? How do we define the line?
  • Does our dominion extend beyond the earth? Space travel? Mining asteroids? How do we decide?
  • Does our dominion extend to “redeeming culture” in the Kuyperian sense? Should we embrace all cultural forms as morally neutral and exploit them for the advancement of the kingdom? What constraints would a biblical view place on that kind of activity?

The longer God gives us to steward the planet, the more complicated the questions get. Turns out we need to steward the questions about stewarding, as well as all the other stuff. Being in the image of God is serious business, and it requires us to know more about him than what he has revealed in us; we need to master the revelation he gives in his Word if we’re going to steward our dominion over the earth in ways that consistently please him.

Responsibility is hard work.

Next time, we’ll ask whether there’s more to the image than just dominion.

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash