Reactions to God's Word

Isaiah is told that his preaching will not make it easier for Israel to believe and repent. On the contrary, it will make it harder. This is so because humans are independent beings at their core. Preaching about the rule of God often challenges people and hardens them, thus confirming them in their independence and in their fate.

If people are independent at heart and preaching makes them more so, how can anyone turn back to God?

- Two Cities: Isaiah - Andrew Reid and Karen Morris

Makes you think, huh?

I take being rebuked, challenged, encouraged, taught by God's Word as a given (sometimes, a very uncomfortable given with hard truths), but as Reid and Morris point out, it's clear from Isaiah 6 that this isn't the natural, default reaction.

How gracious God is in causing us to react to His Word in ways other than becoming more hardened.

Isaiah - First Study

So I finally started on Isaiah, using the study guide lent kindly to me by E.

Oh Lord. I almost wept tears all over my Bible. But I didn't. Because I'm hardcore. And I have no tear ducts. Like Chuck Norris.

2 Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth!
For the LORD has spoken:
“I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
3 The ox knows its master,
the donkey its owner’s manger,
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.”

- Isaiah 1:2-3

Chapter 1 is not the most fun piece of emotional literature I've ever read. I don't know if you've ever spoken to someone, and all of a sudden they just let forth a whole lot of really personal stuff, and you're drawn into empathising with them in an unbelievably vulnerable and 'real' way? Your relationship is never the same afterwards, for you understand so much more about who they are, and why they are the way they are.

Isaiah 1 has always been like that for me. In it, I feel like I really get to see a window of God's emotions and thoughts.

This is not to say that in the NT (or the rest of the Bible), you don't get glimpses of Jesus' realness - you do, e.g. when he cries over Jerusalem, and when he's praying so fiercely in the Garden to have the cup of wrath taken away from him. However, in Isaiah, you get raw chunks of intimate revelations of hurt from a Lover who desperately wants His Beloved to turn back to Him, and Someone who is moved to action to cleanse His City of the corruption that has permeated it. There's a great quote in my study book "human-centeredness has pushed God out of his own city".

But still He loves:

18 “Come now, let us settle the matter,”
says the LORD.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.
19 If you are willing and obedient,
you will eat the good things of the land;
20 but if you resist and rebel,
you will be devoured by the sword.”
For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

- Isaiah 1:18-20

Hallelujah.

Laugh out loud... or not? Thought 6

Oh wow, I thought I'd just written the last thought about this, but I just found the most amazing words from C.S. Lewis.

In his book The Weight of Glory, he writes:

There are no ordinary people... It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind... which exists between people who have from the onset taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

Now THAT's food for thought.

Feelings are a theological nuisance... Or Not. Part 2

Like I've mentioned in earlier posts (see Holiness? How old fashioned or I'm only human or You can change but not...) I'm currently working my way through a book called You can Change that's helping me fight my idols. Dum dum dum.

What I haven't mentioned that one of my idols is that of academic success. Now, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a bit of a geek, a nerd, someone who is very interested in what she studies, and therefore works very hard at it. With relatively good results. So one of the idols I'd created in her head was of getting one of the awesome scholarships or bursaries for overseas studies. So you can imagine the minor existential crisis I had when I found out that I hadn't gotten any calls for follow-up interviews. And coming as it did during a time of idol-smashing, I was already in a fragile state of mind, and even more frustrated and upset than I thought I would have been. There was much wailing. Even more, gnashing of teeth. But the chapter of You can Change that I read later that day put everything into an amusingly ironic light:

Why do we do the things we do? Why do we get angry, frustrated, irritable or depressed or, for that matter, happy, excited or content? Why do we lie, steal, fight and gossip? Why do we dream, fantasize, envy and plot? Why do we overwork and overeat?... (72)

Angry? Frustrated? Irritable? Depressed? Check, check, check, check, check. All of those described me at that moment.

And here's the answer:

According to the Bible, the source of all human behaviour and emotions is the heart (73).

Like Tim Chester points out, our feelings can therefore be used diagnostically to indicate whether our hearts are in the right place. For me, my overthetop reaction showed me clearly that my heart had made too much of this idol, believing that it was what I deserved and what I needed in my future. I should have, instead, been trusting in God's sovereignty, and His plan for my life, no matter how scary it may seem at times. Eek!

So Part 2 on Feelings would conclude: Feelings are a great theological tool for heart-diagnosis :)

What can I say at the end of this two-part thought? I leave you with the challenge of not being overwhelmed by your emotions, but using them to see if God is using them to point back towards Him, or if they can be used to show you about the state of your relationship with Christ.

Which is easy to say now when I'm sitting nice and cosy, happy in my bed, but it's another case when you're actually mad and fuming. Good luck with that ;)

You can change.. but not if you leave Jesus out of the picture.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm currently reading through the book You can change by Tim Chester.

Only thing is, a couple of chapters in, I kinda realized I'm missing this promised change. The first few chapters are a reminder of the gospel: Who God is, and what He has done through His work as Father, Son, and Spirit, and being someone who's already pretty familiar with most of this already, I merely skim read and flicked through those bits.

Then it struck me - the reason why Tim had included those bits in is because the gospel is the only thing that's going to bring about real and lasting change in my life. And the reason I was skipping all those bits was because I'd foolishly forgotten to take my heart condition in for a tune-up, and instead was heading straight to the mechanics of change.

But like Tim writes:

"The root cause of my behaviour is always, always my heart. What we see is behaviour and emotions. But lasting change is achieved only by tackling their source - the heart" (71).

 And if we don't confront our hearts with Jesus, then any behaviour we undertake in the name of change, is certain to be of a superficial nature and of temporary duration.

I'm only human..

I often explain away the times I behave badly, the times I mess up, the times I hurt others with the words "I'm only human."

'Cause surely that's excuse enough to cover over my faults? How can people expect such high standards from me, when the Bible's made it clear that I am naturally sinful and wretched? But I realized I'm going to have to rethink the way I use this phrase, having stumbled upon the following quote:

After each day of creation God declares what he has made to be 'good'. But on the sixth day God's verdict on a world that now includes humanity is 'very good'. God's work wasn't finished until there was something in the world to reflect His glory in the world. We often excuse our actions by saying 'I'm only human.' There's nothing 'only' about begin human: We're truly human as we reflect God's glory.

Yes. I am 'only' human. I do mess up time and time again because. But I think that we only tend to use this phrase in a negative sense, not recognising that being human means being God's image-bearer on earth. And that, my friend, is 'very good'.

PS the quotes from Tim Chester's You can change.
PPS Yes. You're right in thinking that we'll probably be hearing a lot from Tim Chester in the immediate future...

Holiness? How old fashioned.

I've started reading this awesome book called You can change by Tim Chester, and there're some epic quotes in it. One that particularly struck me is that:

"One of our problems is that we think of holiness as giving up things we enjoy out of a vague sense of obligation. But I'm convinced that holiness is always, always good news. God calls us to the good life. He's always bigger and better than anything sin offers."

How true. When was the last time you had to choose between being holy and doing what you wanted to do, and chose the former option without feeling like you were missing out on something? I know I still struggle with that at times.

But Tim's right - God calls us to the GOOD life, and it's important to remember that instead of seeing everything else as the good life, and the life we live in our Christian walk as second-best. There's much that can be said about the negative effects about sin on us and others, but for now, let it suffice to say that having created us, God is the only one who knows how we can live life to the fullest - and that's knowing, trusting and obeying our Creator.

Good ol' Richard Dawkins, Mr Public Science himself...

Wowee! I finally got a chance to read a review of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion today, and man oh man, the author is scathing at times.

Terry Eagleton, the eminent literary critic, has written an article for the London Review of Book, in which he not only tackles holes in Dawkins' argument, but also presents many of the doctrines of Christianity concisely and clearly. I'm tempted to haul out all the bits that I enjoyed, but I think that mean that I have to copy and paste the whole article, so I'm just going to cut a few snippets out, that are particularly thought provoking and insightful.

For anyone else who wants to read the rest of the article, here you go:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

"Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins's own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn't go all the way down for believers, but it doesn't for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. "

"Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself. "

"Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don't look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply "

"On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, [Dawkins] is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare."

"Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins's God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan ('accuser' in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins's God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge."

"Because the universe is God's, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible."

Last but not least: food for thought. "Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it's all down to religion."

Life is unfair

Yip, it is. I know it, you know it, the mosquito that just got squished 'cause I threw a heavy copy of I don't have enough faith to be an atheist at it knows it*, God knows it. Especially God. 'Cause He's the one who came down to earth and then got crucified by those He created.

He didn't have to, he didn't want to, he received no thanks for it then, his friends deserted him, his enemies scorned him, he was forsaken by God, his body was beaten and broken, and he died a slow painful death. Life IS unfair.

So when people are going through tough times, don't throw platitudes at them. Let's acknowledge firstly that yeah, life can suck. But don't forget to remind them that we are children not of an impersonal robotic God, but of a loving Father who understands all the pain and suffering we are going through, for what He went through and is going through because of our rebellion, is so much worse.

* Very interesting book. Try get hold of it: I don't have enough faith to be an atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek.

God's Grace and the Homosexual Next Door: Part I - Transformation

I just read this most amazing book called "God's Grace and the Homosexual Next Door" by Alan Chambers and the Leadership Team at Exodus International. It's so wonderful I just have to share bits and pieces from it! It's written so graciously and humbly, yet uncompromising on the truth that ALL have sinned and that Jesus has died for ALL :).

On the one hand it recognises that there are practical tips and guidelines to follow when dealing with homosexuality, as it is a unique sin in some regards. On the other hand, it's written realizing on that homosexuality is like all other sin in God's eyes and therefore deserves no 'higher abomination' status than other sins. In that regard, it's been a really helpful reminder of who we are as Christians, how sin affects us, and how to minister to others.

This first post looks at various bits and pieces on transformation from the book:

Transformation is a process. Many Christians struggle in their forward movement to maturing. God is gracious and more than able to love us in spite of our fallibility. And that's our task: to effectively communicate God's grace and power to change to a world that thinks to be a Christian one must either be perfect or a hypocrite (p.17).

The gospel isn't just about the hope of eternal bliss: it's about living a transformed life as a citizen of God's kingdom! The Scriptures demand and promise the same of homosexuals as of every man, woman and child: transformation (p.53).

The Holy Spirit works change in the homosexual in the same way He works change in each of us. We begin to seek Him and align our hearts with His heart. We desire more and more to live life in accordance with His Word. As our hearts become aligned with His heart, we begin to desire what He desires. He changes us, and we are no longer what we were. We grow in the knowledge and satisfaction or who we now are, and no longer desire to live in the pit of a false identity. We become God-focussed, rather than self-focussed. We wait on the Lord, and He fulfils us (p. 75-76).

[If every time you read the word 'homosexual' and don't feel that that sentence applies to you, just insert one of the many sins you struggle with].

*All extracts from Chambers, Alan. God's Grace and the Homosexual Next Door. USA: Harvest House Publishers, 2006.