Imagine living in Israel in 580 bc. You are a small poor country. You are only a few years removed from wandering around the desert in tents. Your main city, Jerusalem, has been destroyed. Most of your countrymen have been hauled off into slavery. You are barely getting by.

To the south is Egypt, a 2000 year old empire that was fabulously wealthy and powerful. To the north is Assyria, a rich powerful 1000 year old empire. To the east is Babylon, a rich powerful 1000 year old empire. To the west are Phoenicia and Philistia, rich and powerful 1000 year old empires.These giants can crush you, rob you and enslave you any time they want…….. and they do from time to time.

You pick up a book at the bookstore one day and it contains predictions of the future:

Egypt will be destroyed
Assyria will be destroyed
Babylon will be destroyed
Philistia will be destroyed
Phoenecia will be destroyed

They will wind up as 3rd world backwaters and you, Israel, will prosper and dominate the region.

You would have laughed. You would say that the author(s) were crazy. Imagine a 21st century pundit predicting that the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, and Great Britain would become 3rd world backwaters and that Croatia would prosper and become a major world power. Impossible you might say.

And yet it happened…….all of it.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

If you had known in advance that all of those utterly ridiculous predictions were going to come true, I bet you’d have read that book very closely. You’d probably assume that the writers were geniuses or that they had a source of “inside information”. You would listen very carefully to what they had to say. You might even change your plans based on what they said.

The book, of course, is the old testament.

From where we stand today it’s easy to lose perspective. It’s easy to think that the old testament is a qaint collection of fictional stories. But, if you look at it from the perspective of the people to whom it was addressed, it is amazingly accurate in its foresight…….inspired you might say.

So, when the old testament predicted a messiah, the Israelites took it very seriously.

We should too.

A friend was recently told by a pastor that she could not join our church unless she was baptized by immersion. Sprinkling just won’t do. She did not get immersed. She has not become a member of our church. She is a solid Christian and a good person.

Another friend is gay……. and many gays don’t attend church at all.

What is getting in between them and God?

In both cases, it is rules that are standing in their way. Rules are interfering with their approach to God. Paradoxically……… the old testament is in their way.

So…… how do we balance the old testament rules with the need to draw people closer to Christ?

The rules must be important…… after all, the old testament is full of them………. 613 in the Torah alone. Spreading the faith is also important. But which is more important…….. the rules or spreading the faith.

You may not like this.

The answer is: “it depends”……….and what it depends on is where you are in your walk…….with, toward, or away from God.

When a rule clearly leads a person toward God, there is no problem. For example: don’t worship idols. Things get muddy when a rule stands in the way of somebody’s approach to God. Clearly, the immersion rule is impeding my first friend’s progress. With my second friend, things are a little murkier. The bible clearly and repeatedly says that sex is for husbands and wives. Based on the clarity and repetition of this rule, it must be important. And yet, it is impeding many LGBT people from approaching God.

I think that the best approach is to develop a “my rules/your rules” strategy. In other words, how I apply the rules has to depend on where I am and where the other person is………in their walk. For myself, I will honor as many of the 600 some odd rules as I can. For others, perhaps friends who are just dipping a toe into the water, I will keep it to “love God/ love your neighbor”.

It would be a tragedy for somebody I know to miss out on paradise because I beat them up over one of the rules from the old testament.

It would be a tragedy if somebody walked away from a great church because of a technical disagreement over baptism.

It would be a tragedy to lose an entire group of people over a rule about sex. I’m not saying that we should abandon our rules. I am saying that with others, we should sell “love for God and our neighbors” first. We can worry about rule #7 later, maybe a lot later.

The way I see it, I have my hands full managing my own behavior…….. my own compliance with the rules. I don’t have the energy to oversee the other guy’s situation. I don’t claim the moral superiority to judge him. I won’t conduct an argument that puts an impediment in his way. Because win or lose, the argument alone will drive him away. I’d rather “agree to disagree” if that will remove a barrier between my gay friends and God.

So what do I say to my gay friends if they ask about their practices? I would say that the old testament has rules. So does the new testament……it says that God loves you and so do I……… and for now that’s good enough for me.

The key idea here is that we cannot alienate people by trying to stuff all of the rules down their throat. Start with “love God/ love your neighbor”.

God will take care of the rest.

Scientists have an idea called a Singularity. It is an event that is so drastic, so disruptive that we cannot see past it. We cannot measure what is on the other side. In a way the singularity obliterates any physical evidence of what lies beyond the singularity in time and space. It is possible that time and space as we know it don’t even exist on the other side.

The “big bang” is the classic example of a singularity. Ask any astrophysicist…….any cosmologist what things were like just before the big bang and they will tell you that they haven’t a clue. They will say that they just can’t see or measure what is on the other side of the singularity ……… what is on the other side of the wall.

For you and for me, death is also a singularity…….an event so drastic and disruptive that we just cannot see what is on the other side using the tools of science. Limited by science and secular humanism, we cannot know what lies beyond our own death. In this arena……..science is completely blind and that is terribly important.

So………how do we deal with death and what follows death when science leaves us complety blind?

1. Believe that because science is blind, there is nothing there….. when you die the lights just go out. This troubles me. The fact that you are blind is a poor reason for believing that there is nothing in your path.

2. Just ignore the problem………it will take care of itself. This also is surprisingly common. It may very well be the most commonly used strategy for dealing with………or not dealing with the other side of the wall. This plan is also a problem for me. If eternal life is real…….and because of the singularity problem you cannot say that it isn’t…….I think that not thinking about it, not preparing for it, is a bad strategy. At best it is shortsighted.

3. Make something up. Surprisingly, this too, is extremely common. If you ask a bunch of people what happens to them after they die, you will hear a lot of descriptions of a really nice place, a place that is a everything that they want this messed up world to be. In effect, this is a designer paradise that reflects the wants and needs of the person you are talking to…….a paradise created in their own image. This seems to me dishonest………..unless they happen to be God…… though it is a lot of fun. It is also very comforting for them because it is always a place that makes everybody else change but doesn’t require them to change anything about themself.

4. Choose a religion that describes the other side of the wall, the afterlife. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are the 3 most common. For me, this option makes the most sense. I choose Christianity because I believe that there is enough good evidence supporting the resurrection of Christ. You can read my post on the resurrection for more details.

So……. there it is. You live out your life…….and at the end of it, you face the wall……..and you cannot see past the wall. Science is completely blind. Secular humanism offers nothing. Darwin is silent. Do you deny the other side, ignore the other side, just make something up………..or do you accept the possibility that there is something more, make your best choice and try to prepare for life on the other side of the wall?

When I was young, I was a Boy Scout. I guess I still am. Our motto was “Be Prepared”…….. I’m going with option 4.

I try to operate at the place where secular humanism, atheism, and Christianity meet. I am a Christian, as you suspected. The two ideas that do the most to drive a wedge between Christians and non-Christians are: the age of the earth and the resurrection. Both are tough topics. I’ll save the age of the earth for later.

So what about the resurrection? Did it happen or is it a myth? Which side you choose is moderately important during your 80 years on this earth. But, considering the potential consequences, it is the most important choice you will ever make for the period after you die, which may be a very long time.

I’m not going to take the easy way out…….”because the Bible says so!” But, on the other hand, you cannot completely dismiss the Bible either. Most of the written history supporting the resurrection is collected in the Bible. To discard it out of hand would be like a judge at a trial telling the jury to disregard everything that the defense had said. There is no faster or less honest way to “win” an argument than to reject any evidence that opposes you.

So……here goes.

Point 1: the resurrection is physically, scientifically impossible.

It seems to me that this is the entire point. If a supernatural being (God) wanted to prove a point, boiling water or building a dam would not be a very compelling demonstration. What better way is there to show us that he operates outside of our rules, outside of our world, outside of current scientific understanding than to do something impossible. In a way you have to choose: either science has it all figured out and the resurrection is impossible…….or there are things that are beyond our current understanding. We call these the supernatural……including the resurrection.

Point 2: Jesus lived; he was an historical figure.

He lived and he was crucified. There are contemporary accounts outside of the bible that mention him.

Point 3: He died.

A Roman soldier was well trained to do one job…..to kill people. To botch a judicial execution would have probably cost the soldier his own life. At the end of the crucifixion a soldier drove his pilum (a spear with with an 18″ barbed metal point into Jesus’s chest). This was followed by 3 days without medical treatment. Jesus was dead.

Point 4: He was seen alive after the crucifixion.

On several occasions multiple witnesses spoke with him, saw him, touched him, and ate with him. These accounts are collected in the new testament.

Point 5: The execution of the disciples

At least 10 people suffered torture and a gruesome execution rather than deny that they had witnessed Jesus alive after the crucifixion. I can think of no instance in human history where 10 men in 10 separate events gave up their lives to promote a lie……..a lie that they did not benefit from in any way.

Point 6: Jesus said he was the son of God

He endured torture and crucifixion rather than recant. He was either telling the truth……or he was insane. There is no middle ground. Some say that he was a great man. Others say that he was a prophet. These positions ignore his unambiguous claim to divinity. He was either the son of God or he was insane. The written texts are more consistent with him telling the truth about his divinity. It is very hard to read his teaching and believe that he was insane.

Taken together, I think that these points prove the resurrection beyond a reasonable doubt. This is important because of the chain of logic that follows.

The resurrection happened.
Therefore, Jesus was devine.
Jesus endorsed the old testament.
Therefore, the old testament is true.
Jesus promised paradise to those who believe.
Therefore, the difference between spending eternity in paradise and spending it somewhere else is belief in Jesus.

And that is why this seemingly abstract choice is so important.
This is why this question deserves study and thought from you………a lot of it.

Death

I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

What is death like? My dad almost died once. He was working on a car and was overcome by carbon monoxide. He passed out. Somebody saw him and drug him out to fresh air and he recovered. When asked about it, he said it was really nice. He almost wanted to punch the guy who saved him. Otherwise, no details. I don’t think that my dad was a religious guy. I am not at all sure where he wound up.

All near death stories point to a destination…….a light. Most describe seeing family and friends. Most are pleasant and happy stories. A very few are terrifying. Watch the movie Ghost (Patrick Swayze) sometime.

The bible says that you will “sleep”. You will wake up when Christ returns. It will be just like sleeping at night…there will be no sense of the passage of time. At some point after that believers will be separated from non-believers. Non-believers will go someplace that ranges from unpleasant to horrible beyond understanding.

Believers will go to a perfected world with young healthy perfected bodies. Paradise will be a lot like the world that we know. You will have a young healthy physical body. You will have a job. I will probably be a carpenter………I don’t know what kind of job you should expect if you are a criminal. All of the things that are wrong in this world will be gone. All of the things that are wrong with you will be fixed. You will see and know God in a way that you cannot imagine now. You will understand things that just make no sense here.

Your questions will be answered. I believe that strangers will come up and tell you about how small kindnesses that you passed out……. things that you don’t even remember……..changed their lives.

You will experience a satisfaction unlike anything that you have ever known………. because you will be in exactly the place that you were created for…….you will be doing exactly the thing that you were created to do.

I think that many of the rules in the bible are there to prepare you for the way things will be in paradise. You will experience love in a way that you cannot imagine. You will experience generosity in a way that you cannot imagine. You will experience truth in a way that you cannot imagine.

The bible teaches that our earthly minds cannot fully comprehend what paradise will be like. I accept that I don’t fully understand what it will be like……I just know that I want to be there.

Death as a sailboat. (From Van Dyke……..abridged)

I imagine a beautiful large sailboat at a dock. It is strong, capable, graceful. It sails away and finally disappears over the horizon. Somebody says “Well, it’s gone” and they turn and walk away.

But the sailboat isn’t really gone…….it is just as real, just as strong, capable, and beautiful as it ever was. I just can’t see it from my limited perspective……..from where I’m standing right now.

It isn’t “gone”……..it’s just somewhere else.

My youngest son died just before last Christmas. But; he isn’t “gone”, he is just somewhere else. We will meet again…….and neither of us will need our glasses.

What is relationship with God?

Disclaimer:

I don’t presume to speak for God. This is my best analysis based on my reading of the bible.

God made us for relationship……to walk in the garden with him. But, why? Why does he want relationship with us…….with me? And, what does that relationship look like?

I believe that it is based on a parent/child model. In other words it is not a relationship of equals…..and it is certainly not a relationship where we get to pass judgement on God.

We can’t see it clearly from here.
We can’t understand it clearly from here.
And yet, we must actively seek it.
We must reach out.
We have to take the first step toward God.
Relationship is a gift from God…..not earned. …not deserved ….grace.
It completes us…..it fills a hole in us that we can sense……in our hearts, we know that something is missing.
It requires an act of faith. There is no other precondition.
It requires us to recognize our smallness, our weakness, and our dirtyness………..in a word, our failure. And if you don’t believe that we have failed………. just take a look around.

In the end it requires submission to a benevolent higher being…..and we hate this.

The main impediment to our relationship with God is our ego……our insistence that we are in charge in spite of overwhelming evidence that we have messed it all up.

Our contribution is small…….it mainly involves reaching out from our weakness and imperfection. We give up our position as the center of the universe. We humble ourselves. We touch the shadow of God’s enormous reservoir of love and realize the promise of knowing it more fully in paradise. We must accept on faith that God’s vision for us is better than our own and this goes against everything that our society tells us.

God’s contribution is hard for us to see. It is nonetheless always there and active…even when we lash out at him or ignore him. We cannot turn off God’s pursuit of relationship. We cannot turn off God…….no matter how hard we work at rejecting him.

I can only guess at God’s feeling…at his motivation. He is our ultimate and perfect parent. If he is like our earthly parents……..and I believe that he is. He wants us to be complete and happy. But on his terms…….not on ours. Because his plan is better for us than our own plans.

He knows that our vision and our goals are clouded and imperfect. At best our plan is short term………limited to 90 years, give or take……..in the tangible universe. His vision and plan extend far beyond the space and time that we can comprehend. He knows that his vision, his path for us, will lead us to a better place than the path we choose for ourselves. After all, how can we create and execute a plan when we know next to nothing about our destination? The best destination we can imagine is to either accept death as the ultimate end…….”the lights just go out” or to dream up a very nice version of our failed world. The first option is at least intellectually honest……..though it is depressingly bleak. The second option is appealing, though completely dishonest…..that is unless I actually am the creator of the universe….in that event it works out nicely. Unfortunately, my life experience, at least so far, clearly tells me that I am somewhere well below creator in the chain of command.

So……God loves us and lays out a plan for us……a plan to fulfill and satisfy us. He gives us free will. He then watches us reject his plan………and him. He sees us slip away from him and the paradise that he has built for us. He watches us slip away from the relationship that he knows will complete us. I can’t see into Gods heart. The best I can do is draw conclusions based on his actions and my experience as a parent. My experience tells me that this must break his heart. I think that God must be saddened to the point of tears at our rejection. I think that God probably spends more time shedding tears than hurling lightning bolts.

This is the God that I know.

First off, what is “bad”……Bad is something that makes me unhappy right now. If you ask a child who has just received his DPT shot to describe it, he would say it was a bad thing. He is not necessarily wrong. He is just speaking from a limited, short term, perspective.

Bad things happen. They happen all of the time. They happen to good people. I can’t justify them. I can’t always assign blame for them. It’s not fair. I can’t control them. All I can control is my reaction to them.

The most important outcome when bad things happen to me, and to you, is that the feelings that follow can crowd out the love that we need to give to God and others.

In the worst case, our natural and normal love can turn into anger. Anger at the people we should be loving is sad. Anger at God is a tragedy. It is a tragedy because it is purely self destructive. Do you think that your anger with God does him any real harm? It certainly harms you. Vengeance against the creator of the universe is self defeating………even if you are right……. and you aren’t.

I have struggled with the book of Job for a long time. Job was a good man, certainly better than me. God turned Satan loose on him and this wrecked Job’s life. What follows is about 40 chapters where Job and his friends try unsuccessfully to explain. Then, there is a conversation between Job and God. The gist of it is: “God is big and we are tiny. Things are going to happen that we will never understand.” Some of them will be good and some will be unspeakably bad. I believe that God has a purpose behind it all. Just like the kid’s DPT shot, the bad things serve a greater purpose that is beyond our immediate understanding. We need to be patient in our pain and this is very hard. In our pain we have to fall back on rules #1 & 2…….

LOVE GOD…….. LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR.

My oldest son Ryan lived a life that was rough. He spent many years in various forms of rebellion. Then he turned his life around. He had a daughter, he got baptised, he turned the corner……..and a few months later he died. How could God do this to Ryan? How could God do this to ME? I don’t understand any more than Job did………any more than the kid leaving the doctor’s office.

I believe that God has a plan that is larger than what I can understand. Maybe, there was something waiting for Ryan that God wanted to spare him from. Maybe God said, “Today, Ryan is mine. Tomorrow he may not be”. I believe that someday Ryan and I will sit down in paradise over a cup of coffee and that we will both understand. I bet that the coffee will be fabulous.

When bad things happen, we often ask the wrong question. We ask “Where did this bad thing come from?” Instead we should ask “Where is this bad thing going?” I believe that God is at work, even in the bad times, and that my current “bad thing” is working toward something good…………..even if I can’t see it or understand it from where I’m standing right now.

I have to believe that God knows what he is doing.

Ok, maybe despise is a bit strong. Think of the word Christian and jot down the first few adjectives that come to mind. If your list is primarily negative then it’s fair to say that you dislike Christians at the very least. Often, people who dislike, or even despise Christians do so because of experiences with Christians in their past.

Perhaps, You knew a Christian who was judgemental, who acted as though they were better than you, who implied that you were going straight to hell. Maybe they practiced a brand of Christianity that was an exercise in pain. Maybe they were legalistic, constantly quoting rules from the Bible. Maybe they handed you a booklet saying that Catholics are not Christians. Maybe they said that the problems that you face are a punishment from God because of something that you did……or your grandfather did. Maybe the way that they expressed their faith was just plain wierd. Once a Christian doggedly tried to save me in a public restroom. He tried to grill me about my faith to see if it met his standards……to see if I was following enough of his rules. (I sure hope he’s not watching the gate when I arrive). There are a lot of different ways to be a Christian. In a word…….it’s a big tent. Some do it very well……… others, not so much.

So……… if you are going to judge Christians, please don’t base your judgement on people who are doing it badly. Judge based on somebody who is doing it well…….somebody like Billy Graham or Mother Teresa. They are much closer to the heart of Christianity than the guy who acts pious or judgemental and then mistreats you.

Here are some simple tests to rate a Christian:

Are they acting out of love………for you?

Do they radiate joy?

If a Christian you meet fails these two tests, then don’t use them as an example of Christianity………… find a better model.

If you dislike Christians because of an experience in your past, maybe the picture of Christians that you are lugging around is inaccurate. Maybe you were exposed to somebody who just wasn’t doing it well……. and there are plenty of them. There is a very easy way to experience Christianity done well. Go to the source.

Get a copy of the bible that has the words that Christ spoke in red. Just read the red words. It won’t take long. Then you will see my faith as it was intended to be.

You will find that it is very hard to dislike the speaker.

I once dated a girl. She was really nice. She was wise, honest, kind, funny……..I could go on. The only trouble was that she was a serious, committed Christian………..and I wasn’t.

One day she asked me, “What are you afraid of……… that God will ask you to do something that you don’t want to do? ”

She hit the nail on the head. I was terrified, because I had plans for my life……and I realized that God had plans too. I knew that God’s plans trumped mine. I knew that getting tangled up with God might interfere with my plans. (What if he sent me to Africa?) I realized that if I was going to be the center of my universe……..if I was going to get what I wanted……….then there was no room for God. In a word, I knew that God is disruptive…..and I needed to get him out of my way.

I was, at my core, a secular humanist/Darwinist.

I finally broke it off……..because I could see that her Christianity might interfere with my plans for my life.  At the time my response to her made perfect sense. It still would……if I could just get rid of this disruptive God.

Enter Darwinism………if the universe is a giant biochemical accident, then there is no need for a creator……..no need for God. I can shove him aside and take over. In effect,  I can use Darwinism to kill God and then I can take over. This is the heart of secular humanism.

There it is. We can’t tolerate anybody else being in charge. So we use Darwinism and evolution to kill the creator. With no creator, we are the highest life form in the universe. We get to run things…….we are in charge. I think that this is the crux of the problem for the unchurched…… for the secular humanist/Darwinist. We are smart……. the smartest creatures to ever exist. We believe that we should be in charge. We make plans to further our goals. Our plans must be the best, because we are the smartest creatures alive.

This is great………. as long as Darwin was correct.

But, not so great…………. if Darwin was wrong…….if there is a more intelligent being out there……..if there is a creator.

The problem is that God is smarter, not to mention kinder and more generous than we are……. the problem is that God has a plan for us that is better than our own. We just can’t see all of the outcomes.

What I know now, is that God’s plan is a plan for my well being…….. and the well being of those around me. In order to profit from God’s plan, I have to step a way from the center. I have to put God……. and his plan……… in the center. My ego, my hubris must take a back seat.

In a way, this is the most important decision of your life……Darwin’s accident………..or God’s intelligent design.

In his novel, “Slaughterhouse Five”, Kurt Vonnegut describes the end of the world. (A great book BTW).

A Tralfamadorian test pilot panics, pushes the wrong button and the universe vaporizes….not just earth……. the entire universe. As a hypothetical, imagine that this actually happens. There is nothing left but an endless cloud of subatomic particles, nothing larger than a proton. Visualize this cloud for a minute……….minute subatomic particles floating in a black sea of nothing for as far as you can imagine. This is essentially what the scientists tell us existed right after the “big bang”.

Now, ask yourself this question:

“After the Tralfamadorian disaster, do you believe that this cloud of subatomic particles, floating in an endless sea of nothing, will spontaneously reconstitute the earth and everything in it just as it is today……all by itself…..purely by random accident.” Remember……..we are talking about the real world, not a theoretical construct.

Choose one answer:

YES
NO
IT’S POSSIBLE BUT IMPROBABLE

If you answered YES, then you are a secular humanist/Darwinist.

If you answered NO, then you are a creationist.

If you answered POSSIBLE BUT IMPROBABLE, then things get complicated. You are exploring the boundary between improbable and impossible. In the real world, there is no clear line. What is theoretically possible may be practically impossible. The theoretical world and the real world are often not the same.

So, we go to the next question:

What is the probability that the universe and our earth will spontaneously reconstite themselves after the Tralfamadorian disaster?

1 chance in 10
1 chance in 100
1 chance in 1,000
1 chance in a million
1 chance in 10 to the 50th power.

As you can see, you reach a point where improbable effectively becomes impossible. Some statisticians use 10 to the 50th power (10 with 50 zeroes). This is great theory……..but 10 to the 50th is hard to apply in real life.

I find the Tom Clancy analysis more useful. In his book “Patriot Games”, a spy tells his boss something (and I’m paraphrasing). The boss says “how confident are you?” The spy says “I’m not absolutely sure”. The boss says, “nothing is absolutely for certain…… but, are you sure enough?” By that the boss means “are you sure enough to act based on the information?” This is probability made practical.

So……….. are you sure enough that the universe will spontaneously regenerate itself after the Tralfamadorian disaster to reject the possibility of an intelligent creator?

Are you sure enough to reject the possibility of paradise………of hell?