Sorry, I couldn’t resist

Sometimes I find myself in conflict with Satan.

This conflict can come in many forms: temptation, addiction, hatred, vengeance, jealousy, dishonesty, infidelity, and many more. Sometimes he attacks you directly……. sometimes he attacks someone you love. We don’t like to think about the guy very much. But, Satan is very real and he is active in our world.

I often think of him as evil with a to-do list.

If you don’t believe in Satan or don’t feel any conflict with him, is it possible that you and he are travelling in the same direction?

Maybe he is not attacking you because he is satisfied with the path you are on. In other words, perhaps he has nothing to gain by messing with you. You don’t have to be a serial killer, a cheating spouse, a thief or a habitual liar. You just have to be distant from God or moving away from him. C.S.Lewis said it well in “the Screwtape Letters”, (advice to a young demon from his mentor, a senior demon):

“You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy (God). It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards will do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Read the Bible and assess your path. Are you close to God……..or at least trying to get closer? Are you closer to him today than you were 5 years ago? If you need to make a change……..do so.

Change your direction and you just may bump into Satan.

Please understand, not everyone who is blessed with a happy peaceful life is on Satan’s path. Many, including myself, are simply blessed by God’s grace.

However, I am convinced that a great many people who are leading lives that look charmed and trouble free are doing so because Satan has nothing to gain by interfering with them.

I am not encouraging you to look for Satan in the lives of those who “have it made”. Rather, I want you to examine yourself. Assess your path. Where are you headed….toward the light or toward the nothing? Be sure that you are on God’s path or at least working toward it. When you are attacked, consider it a badge of honor…….. that Satan considers you to be such a problem…….. that attacking you is worth his trouble.

There is a philosophy among native Americans. It is that a warrior is judged by the quality of his enemies. If you hide under a rock, you will be safe. If you do nothing, nobody is going to attack you. You just aren’t worth the trouble. But, if you stand up and say something……do something…….build something,  then you become important enough……..perhaps dangerous enough to attract the attention of those who disagree with you…..those who have a different agenda. The more active…..the more dangerous….. that you are, the more opposition you will generate……..and the opposition will become more strident.

A few years ago, in my community, a company opened a store that sold pornography. There was a little grumbling, but not much. A few years later, a ministry opened a museum that taught that the world was created by God in 7 days just as the Bible says. There was an immediate uproar. The Creation Museum was broadly attacked in the media. The opposition tried to fight their zoning change. They objected to tax incentives. They laughed…….hard. Comedians came all of the way from New York City to ridicule the museum. All of this from people who were silent when the pornography shop opened.

So, if you are following………or seeking God, don’t be surprised if you meet resistance. In a way, the fact that you are under attack, means that somebody considers you to be dangerous to their agenda. Somebody sees you as an item on their To-Do list. Somebody considers you to be such a problem that you are worth the trouble of attacking.

Somewhere out there………….is an enemy you can be proud of.

Darwinian’s laugh at me…… often behind my back…….sometimes to my face.

I think that many Christians are so intimidated……. so afraid of the ridicule of the Darwinian’s that they don’t stand up for creation. Creation is critical………it is the defining act of God. It must be defended.

I believe that Darwinian evolution has done more damage to mankind in general, and to Christianity in particular, than anything else in human history. Once you accept this theory……..then there is absolutely no need for God. Once you get to that point, it is very easy to take the next step. Because you no longer need God……. you can deny/ignore/ minimalize him. Hundreds of millions of people have taken that next step. This is tragic. I believe that there will be more people in hell over Darwinism than over murder, rape, theft, lies, and hatred combined.

The first punch line that the Darwinist pulls out is “How old is the earth? Do you really believe that the earth is only 6000 years old? (Or 3000 or 9000….. you pick the number.) ”

That number comes from adding up 7 literal 24 hour days of creation plus the number of years that each man in our geneology lived. In short it comes from a literal interpretation of the bible. The scientists on the other hand tell us that the earth is hundreds of millions of years old. The difference is huge. How do we defend creation……. how do we reconcile those 2 numbers?

We all agree that about 6000 years ago….. give or take…… there were people on the earth. So let’s focus on the time before that. How long did it take to get from nothing to Adam & Eve? 7 days….. or hundreds of millions of years. How do we reconcile the bible’s explanation with the scientist’s explanation?

It seems to me that there are 3 ways to handle this:

1. The 7 days of creation are not literal days. Instead they represent 7 epochs……totalling up to hundreds of millions of years. The result is the world at the end of “day” 7…….roughly as we know it…… with Adam & Eve in the garden.

2. God created the world old. The universe is a very complicated place. Many of its systems are so delicately balanced and so completely interdependent that it is statistically impossible that they formed, one at a time, by accident. The cosmologists struggle with this problem. So…… God designed a finely balanced, interconnected, ecosystem and called it into being……already old. This means that all of the things that we dig up (yes……even the dinosaurs) were created right where we find them. They are not hundreds of millions of years old…….they just look that way. If you think about Adam & Eve, this makes sense. They were not put into the garden as newborns. They could not have survived. God put them there as mature adults. In short……God created Adam & Eve old. He had to, in order for them to survive. In the same way he created the world as a work in progress…….already finely tuned and interconnected. He had to, in order for it to survive. If God can create an “aged” Adam & Eve…….. he can create an “aged” universe.

3. The scientists are wrong. I hear this a lot. It usually involves some pretty strained interpretations of the fossil record. The trouble is that this explanation absolutely will not fly with our primary target audience, the secular humanist…..the unchurched. They just laugh. It does work beautifully………for preaching to the choir. But……….I don’t think it is going to save many darwinists……..and I believe that reaching them is one of our jobs. The greatest gift that we can give a friend, relative, or co-worker is God today…..and later…..paradise.

It is possible that all three things happened. I have to say that at this point I tend to favor option #1.  I will flesh this out in a future post……..stay tuned.

Let me say that I’m struggling with this. So…….right now…….I don’t have a clue how old the earth is……and I really don’t care. I don’t see why it can’t be hundreds of millions of years old………I don’t see why it can’t be thousands of years old.

So……….don’t get distracted.

The key issue is not how old the earth is…….or how old it looks. The key issue is creation. Did it occur by trillions of random, constructive, cumulative, accidents that all interact flawlessly to make the incredibly complicated ecosystem that we call the universe. Or……is it the work of an intelligent alien life form…………God?

So, don’t let the Darwinists use someone’s time line to beat you up. The age of the earth is unknown. Even more to the point…….the age of the earth is unimportant. The important issue is that there is a creator………he cares about you and he wants to spend time…….a lot of time…… with you.

There are things that we believe……usually things that we have believed for a long time…….. things that have served us well. These are part of our code of living. We use them to make important decisions. They define who we are.

But, what if one of these central ideas that we use to run our lives doesn’t jive with the Bible……. what if it doesn’t align with God?

I once heard somebody say that we spend a lot of our prayers trying to recruit God to our side……… and not so much time making sure that we are on his side. In other words we want God to conform to us more than we want to conform to him.

How often do you pray this prayer?

“God….. take over my life and do with it as you please!”

Pretty terrifying…….at least for me.

Let’s look at two hot button issues of the day……abortion rights and gun rights. I chose these two because I want to be sure that both the left and the right are uncomfortable. I want to be sure that everybody’s ox gets gored.

The left wants the right to have an abortion, that is the right to kill your unborn child. The right wants the right to own guns…… which kill thousands of innocent people each year. For perspective, there are about 600,000 abortions each year in the United States and about 13,000 gun related homicides. Guns and abortions are very popular in America. But, how does God feel about this?

And, to get to the point of this post……… why doesn’t the left ask how God feels about killing your child……why doesn’t the right ask how God feels about assault rifles?

We don’t ask because we don’t want to know. We don’t ask because we aren’t interested in conforming ourselves to God. We don’t ask because we are afraid that we are not on God’s side. We don’t ask because we are afraid of what we will find if we look under that rock. Ignorance really is bliss.

But what about the truth? You see, the truth is still out there……even if we ignore it. God is still out there……even when we ignore him.

I am a shooter, a hunter, and a gun owner. I own and shoot assault rifles……and I really enjoy it. But, if I look hard at the heart of God and ask the questions……….will there be abortions in heaven?…….will there be assault rifles in heaven?…………I’d have to answer no.

This makes me uncomfortable and it makes me sad…… because, on at least one important issue in my world, I doubt that I am on God’s side.

That’s not the worst of it. I picked these issues as really big emotional examples. There are no doubt dozens of others that I haven’t really thought about………… and that you haven’t thought about. There are dozens of other rocks that we haven’t looked under.

Maybe we both need to spend a little more time asking……”how does God feel about that?”

Thank God for grace………. I’ll be back next week with something a little lighter.

We all make mistakes. (Yes……. me too)

We all do things that are wrong.

You know it, I know it, and so do others.

So does the one who put you here.

Screwing up is unfortunately so common, that it is statistically normal. We hate to admit it. But, you can’t honestly look at what’s going on in this world and deny this fundamental truth. As an aside, we are acutely aware of the errors of others………not so much with our own mistakes.

Today’s question is “what do we do with our mistakes?” I’ll save the mistakes of others for another day. They are far less dangerous as it turns out.

Our most common choices are:

Deny that we did it.

Ignore/forget it and move on.

Redefine it so that it is no longer wrong.

Admit it, explore it, learn from it, and seek forgiveness.

Here we go:

Deny it:

Surprisingly, this is very common. Have you ever been pulled over for speeding. The officer leans in and says “Sir, do you know how fast you were going?” Now you know you were doing 82 in a 70 mph zone…… you know because when you saw the blue light you looked at your speedometer. But, what did you say? The point is that it is very easy to deny an error to others…….it is impossible to deny it to yourself.

Ignore/forget it:

I call this plan B. When denying the error to ourself fails, we just stuff it down, try to forget it and move on. The more that we do this, the better we get at it. I know people who are incredibly skilled at moving on and leaving the wreckage behind. At least they think so. Have you ever been backpacking? I used to backpack………when I was younger. You load up about 50 pounds of gear in a pack and head down the trail. You walk all day and it feels pretty normal. Just before sunset, you shuck off the pack and suddenly you feel like you are walking on air. Only then do you sense the load that you have been carrying all day. Ignoring/forgetting is like that. We drag the burden of the mistake along…… we get used to it……. we begin to think that it is normal……. we don’t notice it so much…… until we finally let it go. But, make no mistake about it……it was there all along wearing us down.

Redefine it:

This is the modern way to solve the problem. We find an intellectual tool that allows us to change the wrong we have done into a right. I’m not going to delve into concrete examples here. My purpose is not to beat others up. I have enough problems of my own. The thing is that….. in our hearts….and it may be deeply burried…….. we still know that we are wrong. We have to continually expend emotional energy……every day……turning our wrong into a right. The deeper we have buried it and the greater the wrong, the harder we have to work……. the more often we have to reinforce our justification. There is a second problem with redefining. Because we have bought into the idea that what we are doing is right, we keep repeating the wrong……… and digging the hole deeper.

Admit/explore/learn/seek forgiveness:

At first this is tough. We have to identify and accept our failure. This is very hard on our self esteem. We hate the idea that we have been wrong……or even worse “bad”. Our society has decided that maintaining our self esteem is paramount. We have “gradeless” schools and “attendance awards” so that we can deny our failures…… so that we can believe that we are succeeding in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. But, in our hearts, we still know. The wrongness is still there. The next step is to dispassionately analyze our error and the damage that we’ve done. The final step is to ask for forgiveness. The greatest gift of Christianity is that it gives us a tool for receiving forgiveness. When you do, it’s like dropping the 50 pound pack and walking on air.

This gift cost Christ a lot. It’s value is immense…… and it costs you next to nothing……except that you have to be humble enough to recognize it and to ask for it.

I can promise you………it’s worth it.