wilson's indicatives

I've posted a number of times on indicatives v. imperatives. Here's a simple explanation of the terms by Doug Wilson.

“There is a basic difference between the indicative and the imperative. The indicative is simply a statement of fact. the imperative is a command. The indicative states, “The book is on the table.” The imperative commands, “Put the book on the table.” The former states what is; the latter attempts to control what will be.

Many Christians mishandle the Scripture because they do not properly distinguish between the two. The central example of this is the turning of indicatives into imperatives. The Bible tells us that something is so, and we attempt to change it into a command to make something so.

The imperatives of the Bible tell me what I must do . The indicatives of the Bible tell me what has been done . When I take the message of what has been done and turn it into something that I must do, I am twisting Scripture.

It is easy to see this confusion when others are guilty of it. For example, many non-Christians cannot understand the gospel. The gospel is simply the message of what has been done for us in Christ. Non-Christians tend to make the gospel into something we have to do. “Good teacher, tell me what I must do to inherit eternal life.” The gospel is the Grand Indicative. It is the message of what has been done. The imperatives that accompany the gospel are based on a proper understanding of it. Once I understand the gospel I am told to love my wife or pray without ceasing. These are imperatives.”

(HT)

living free

More from Terry Virgo on righteous living - freed from sin's condemnation! But you really must watch to part 1 first.


Terry Virgo - God's Lavish Grace - Part 2.

Be sure to watch Freed from Sin's Condemnation first.

need v. comfort

John Piper in Bloodlines:

To be a Christian is to move toward need, not comfort. Christian life means to get up in the morning and go to bed at night dreaming not about how to advance my comforts but how to advance some great God-centered cause. When we speak of multiplying and growing, we mean raising up a people who don’t spend themselves day and night pursuing self-preservation and self-exaltation and self-recreation, but who pursue something bigger and greater than themselves or their family or their church.

christianity's scheme

William Wilberforce in A Practical View of Christianity:

They consider not that Christianity is a scheme “for justifying the ungodly” [Rom 4.5] by Christ’s dying for them “when yet sinners” [Rom 5.6-8] — a scheme “for reconciling us to God” — when enemies [Rom 5.10]; and for making the fruits of holiness the effects, not the cause, of our being justified and reconciled.

(via)

phil strout

Phil Strout, newly installed National Directorship of the Vineyard:

The posture of my heart, and what I think the Vineyard really needs, is a dependency on the Holy Spirit. We may know what we want to say. We may know where we want to go. But if we are not enabled and empowered by the Spirit of God, we cannot do it. So we need to be absolutely Spirit-filled people. We should say all the time, “Come, Holy Spirit.” There should never be a meeting in the Vineyard where it’s not said “Come, Holy Spirit.” There should never be a home group, a church service, a board meeting, a council meeting, a counseling session, a rap session, a staff meeting, where it should not be said, “Come Holy Spirit.” That is the language we are inviting. We know the Spirit is omnipresent, but we are saying, “We need you! We need your fresh infilling, we need your wisdom, we need you! We cannot go on without you.” Even though we’ve done this for 10 years and 20 years and 30 years and 40 years, we must continually say “We need you.”

We long for the presence of God, but not just in a meeting. We want the presence of God when we’re driving down the highway. We want the presence of God when we are going grocery shopping. One of the things we have been taught that is a hallmark of the Vineyard is that we experience and we worship God. We actually experience God. It’s not something theological, it’s not something cognitive, it is something that we actually experience. We do it with our children; we’re going to take our kids out on the playground to God’s greater glory. We’re going to experience God. His presence is everything. We don’t have a message without his presence.

... We want a reputation. Do we want to be an avant-garde group, a cutting-edge something, have the latest and the greatest with everything that we do? I believe this with all my heart: Let us be known for the way we love people. Let us be known for the way we love God. We might not be the sharpest group, we might not be the most spiritual group, we might not have all our ducks in a row, but what we do is, we love.

birthing protocols

I found this oldie on cell group birthing protocols - it's still relevant. In the diagram:

• X is the group leader
• H is the host
• S is an individual
• those with the subscript a are the apprentices

Birth type A and B work nicely. Type C is just a cold start from nothing is only as necessary. It should not be the norm in a healthy small group system.

To me, this is applicable to church planting as well ...

doctrines and creeds

I get it when people point to the misuse of doctrines and creeds through history. It is true that there have been and still are problems. But I don't get the abject hatred and bitterness toward those who hold to these. Moreover, I don't get the failure to see similar abuses on the part of those who do not proclaim to hold to doctrines or creeds. And, as Carl Trueman rightly notes, we all have these whether written and well articulated or not:

"Christians are not divided between those who have creeds and confessions and those who do not; rather, they are divided between those who have public creeds and confessions which are written down and exist as public documents, subject to public scrutiny, evaluation, and critique; and those who have private creeds and confessions which are often improvised, unwritten, and thus not open to public scrutiny, not susceptible to evaluation and, crucially and ironically, not subject to testing by scripture to see whether they are true or not." ~ Carl Trueman

Mostly however, I'm shocked when I find professing Christians claim that our faith is not one of doctrines and that Jesus was the antithesis of these. Interestingly, I read the following last night in Bloodlines by John Piper:

One of the best historical illustrations of the way the gospel of Christ transforms persons and sustains structural intervention is the life of William Wilberforce (1759–1833) and the Clapham Sect. One of the most important and least known facts about the battle to abolish the slave trade in Britain two hundred years ago is that it was sustained by a passion for the doctrine of justification by faith alone—which is at the center of the gospel of Christ.

Wilberforce was a spiritually exuberant and doctrinally rigorous evangelical. He had been personally transformed by the gospel and was carried along by a passion for the glory of Christ and the good of his fellow men. He battled tirelessly in Parliament for the outlawing of the British slave trade. And though most people do not know it, the particular doctrines of the gospel are the power that sustained him in the battle that ended the vicious trade.

The key to understanding Wilberforce is to read his own book A Practical View of Christianity. There he argued that the fatal habit of his day was to separate Christian morals from Christian doctrines. His conviction was that there is “perfect harmony between the leading doctrines and the practical precepts of Christianity." He had seen the devastating effects of denying this: “The peculiar doctrines of Christianity went more and more out of sight, and . . . the moral system itself also began to wither and decay, being robbed of that which should have supplied it with life and nutriment.” But Wilberforce knew that “the whole superstructure of Christian morals is grounded on their deep and ample basis.”

This “ample basis” and these “peculiar doctrines” that sustained Wilberforce in the battle against the slave trade were the doctrines of human depravity, divine judgment, the substitutionary work of Christ on the cross, justification by faith alone, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the practical necessity of fruit in a life devoted to good deeds. Wilberforce was not a political pragmatist. He was a radically God-centered, gospel-saturated Christian politician. And his zeal for Christ, rooted in this gospel, was the strength that sustained him in the battle.

At the center of these essential “gigantic truths” was (and is) justification by faith alone. The indomitable joy that perseveres in the battle for justice is grounded in the experience of Jesus Christ as our righteousness. “If we would . . . rejoice,” Wilberforce said, “as triumphantly as the first Christians did, we must learn, like them, to repose our entire trust in [Christ] and to adopt the language of the apostle, ‘God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of Jesus Christ,’ ‘who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption’ [Gal. 6:14; 1 Cor. 1:30].”

In other words, the gospel of justification by faith alone is essential to right living—and that includes political living. Astonishingly, Wilberforce said that the spiritual and practical errors of his day that gave strength to the slave trade were owing to the failure to experience the truth of this doctrine:

They consider not that Christianity is a scheme “for justifying the ungodly” by Christ’s dying for them “when yet sinners”—a scheme “for reconciling us to God”—when enemies; and for making the fruits of holiness the effects, not the cause, of our being justified and reconciled.

This was why he wrote A Practical View of Christianity. The “bulk” of Christians in his day, he observed, were “nominal”—that is, they pursued morality without first relying utterly on the free gift of justification by grace alone through faith alone on the basis of Christ alone. They got things backward: first they strived for moral uplift; then they appealed to God for approval. That is not the Christian gospel.

And it will not transform a nation. It will not heal the racial wounds of a nation. It would not sustain a politician through eleven Parliamentary defeats over twenty years of vitriolic opposition.

The battle for abolition was sustained by getting the gospel right: “The true Christian . . . knows . . . that this holiness is not to precede his reconciliation to God, and be its cause; but to follow it, and be its effect. That, in short, it is by faith in Christ only that he is to be justified in the sight of God.” When Wilberforce put things in this order, he found invincible strength and courage to stand for the justice of abolition.

I pray that the gospel of Jesus Christ will have this kind of effect on many today. May it be spoken and lived by millions of true Christians in their daily lives. May it impel them into greater pursuits of racial diversity and harmony. May it awaken in some a passion for a public life of engagement in the community and the political arena. And may it conquer Satan, guilt, pride, hopelessness, paralyzing feelings of inferiority, greed, hate, fear, and apathy. In that triumph, may Christ be magnified and peoples of every race and ethnicity find harmony in him as their supreme treasure.

gospel and apathy

John Piper in Bloodlines on the gospel and apathy:

Apathy is passionless living. It is sitting in front of the television night after night and living your life from one moment of entertainment to the next. It is the inability to be shocked into action by the steady-state lostness and suffering of the world. It is the emptiness that comes from thinking of godliness as the avoidance of doing bad things instead of the aggressive pursuit of doing good things.

If that were God’s intention for the godliness of his people, why would Paul say, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12)? People who stay at home and watch clean videos don’t get persecuted. Godliness must mean something more public, more aggressively good.

In fact, the aim of the gospel is the creation of people who are passionate for doing good rather than settling for the passionless avoidance of evil. “[Christ] gave himself for us . . . to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14). The gospel produces people who are created for good works (Eph. 2:10), and have a reputation for good works (1 Tim. 5:10), and are rich in good works (1 Tim. 6:18), and present a model of good works (Titus 2:7), and devote themselves to good works (Titus 3:8, 14), and stir each other up to good works (Heb. 10:24).

And when they set about them, the word they hear from God is, “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord” (Rom. 12:11). The gospel does not make us lazy. It makes us fervent. The Greek for fervent signifies boiling. The gospel opens our eyes to the eternal significance of things. Nothing is merely ordinary anymore.

Christ did not pursue us halfheartedly. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the uttermost (John 13:1). His death gives the deepest meaning to the word passion. Now he dwells in us. How will we not pray for the fullest experience of his zeal for the cause of justice and love? “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10).

small groups that matter

Rick Warren on building small groups that matter:

Authenticity

Authentic fellowship is not superficial, surface-level chit-chat. It is genuine, heart-to-heart, sometimes gut-level, sharing. It happens when people get honest about who they are and what is happening in their lives -- when they share their hurts, reveal their feelings, confess their failures, disclose their doubts, admit their fears, acknowledge their weaknesses, and ask for help and prayer.

Of course, being authentic requires both courage and humility. It means facing our fear of exposure, of rejection, and of being hurt again. Why would anyone take such a risk? Because it’s the only way to grow spiritually and maintain emotional health. The Bible says, “Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed” (James 5:16, Msg). We only grow by taking risks, and the most difficult risk of all is to be honest with ourselves and with others.

Mutuality

Mutuality is the art of giving and receiving. It’s depending on each other. The Bible says, “The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part” (1 Corinthians 12:25, Msg).

Mutuality is the heart of fellowship. It’s building reciprocal relationships, sharing responsibilities, and helping each other. Paul said, “I want us to help each other with the faith we have. Your faith will help me, and my faith will help you” (Romans 1:12, NCV).

All of us are more consistent in our faith when others walk with and encourage us. The Bible commands mutual accountability, mutual encouragement, mutual serving, and mutual honoring. More than 50 times in the New Testament we are commanded to do different tasks to “one another” and “each other.” The Bible says, “Make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification” (Romans 14:19, NIV).

Sympathy

Sympathy is not giving advice or offering quick, cosmetic help; sympathy is entering in and sharing the pain of others. The Bible commands: “Share each other’s troubles and problems, and in this way obey the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2, NLT). Sympathy says, “I understand what you’re going through, and what you feel is neither strange nor crazy.” The fellowship of suffering is the deepest, most intense level of fellowship. It’s where we enter into each other’s pain and grief and carry each other’s burdens.

We need each other most during times of deep crisis, grief, and doubt. When circumstances crush us to the point that our faith falters, that’s when we need believing friends the most. We need a small group of friends to have faith in God for us and to pull us through. In a small group, the Body of Christ is real and tangible, even when God seems distant.

Mercy

Fellowship is a place of grace -- a place where mistakes aren’t rubbed in, they’re rubbed out. Fellowship happens when mercy wins over justice.

We all need mercy, because we all stumble and fall and require help getting back on track. We need to offer mercy and be willing to receive mercy from each other. God says, “When people sin, you should forgive and comfort them, so they won't give up in despair” (2 Corinthians 2:7, CEV).

Forgiveness must be immediate ... You can’t have fellowship without it. After sins are forgiven trust can be rebuilt. This takes time. The best place to restore trust is within the supportive context of a small group that offers both encouragement and accountability.

Real fellowship is an essential part of the Christian life. It cannot be overlooked. Building small groups around authenticity, mutuality, sympathy and mercy will provide a place where your members can find the fellowship they need and begin soaring in their walk with Christ.

shallow small groups

Time resurrect the shallow small group reminder.

small group abc's

As one thinks about the typical small group, there's the Core Group (A), the Consistent Attendees (B), and the Newest People to the Group (C).

The core group can be expected to:

• Plan group sessions
• Model group life
• Train B’s
• Expand group

The consistent attendees can be expected to:

• Imitate core leaders
• Be involved in ministry
• Keep in contact with C’s

And the newest people to the group can be expected to:

• Just come
• Primarily receive ministry, although they may assist the B’s

chan on discipleship

Clear points from Francis Chan on discipleship ...

life questions

50 questions to ask yourself and allow others to ask you:

1. Do I have a vision for my life?
2. Do I have a vision for the work I'm involved in?
3. Do I enjoy what I do?
4. Do I feel His pleasure in what I'm doing?
5. Do I still have a passion?
6. Do I pursue intimacy with Jesus?
7. Do I make enough space for prayer?
8. Do I study the Bible for me?
9. Did the Bible live for me today?
10. Am I seeking evidence of God's power in my life/ministry?
11. Is Jesus real to me?
12. Do I live out what I teach?
13. Am I teachable and accountable?
14. Am I available and approachable?
15. Do I listen well?
16. Do I make myself vulnerable to others?
17. Am I leading with a servant heart?
18. Can I be trusted?
19. Do I keep my promises?
20. Do I keep my perspectives?
21. How do I handle pressure? (from people, work, or circumstances)
22. How is my health?
23. Am I eating well?
24. Am I sleeping well?
25. Is my family happy?
26. How are my friendships?
27. Do I have healthy relationships with those I serve: my peers, my leaders and with the opposite sex?
28. What do I do when I'm hungry/angry/lonely/tired?
29. Am I a slave to work, friendships, hobbies or habits?
30. Am I taking enough rest?
31. Do I manage my time well?
32. How do I spend my spare time?
33. Do I keep a healthy balance between church, work and home life?
34. Am I making/maintaining relationships with non-Christians?
35. Do I walk in grace and forgiveness or do I judge people?
36. Is there anybody whom I fear, dislike, disown, criticize, hold resentment toward or disregard? If so, what am I doing about it?
37. Am I defeated in any part of my life, jealous, impure, critical, irritable, touchy or distrustful?
38. Do I manage my money well?
39. Do I give generously?
40. Do I envy other people's opportunities/lives?
41. Do I grumble or complain constantly?
42. Am I leading to promote myself, or to serve God and people?
43. Am I walking with integrity?
44. Am I decisive and confident?
45. Am I willing to take risks?
46. Am I making goals and reaching them?
47. Am I willing to make sacrifices?
48. Is the work I'm involved in growing?
49. Am I keeping my cutting edge?
50. Am I moving in the power of the Spirit?

the gospel and hate

John Piper in Bloodlines:

The gospel of Jesus cuts the nerve of hatred and anger and the bent to be a blaming person. It does so in many ways. I’ll mention two that seem almost opposite but are both crucial in the quest for racial justice and harmony.

First, when we receive the gracious provision of God to forgive our sins through Christ, our bent to be unforgiving is broken. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Eph. 4:32–5:1). Our kindness and forgiveness of others is empowered by our being forgiven. Our loving others is empowered by our being loved by God. We know we are sinners. We know that the offense we have given to God is greater than any offense others have given to us, and if God was gracious to us, we must be gracious to others. You cannot authentically rejoice in being treated better than you deserve while treating others the way they deserve, or worse.

The gospel cuts the nerve of hatred by making us feel the brokenhearted gratitude that God’s wrath was once on us and was removed, not because we deserved it but because of his absolutely free grace. Freely you have received; freely give. As the Father has sent me to love, Jesus said, so I send you. Love your enemies so that you may prove yourselves to be children of God, because that is the way he treated you. If you cherish grudges, you do not cherish God’s grace. But the definition of a Christian is one who receives and cherishes the grace of God in Christ.

Second, the gospel overcomes vengeance by promising that justice will be done. One of the emotional boosters behind our judicial sense is that justice must be done, especially when our rights are denied. And when it looks like justice will not be done to us, we feel the need to take matters into our hands and exact vengeance.

To this impulse, the gospel comes with a double message. All wrongs in the world will be punished justly, either on the cross (for the wrongdoers who trust Christ) or in hell (for the wrongdoers who don’t). “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ To the contrary, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head’” (Rom. 12:19–20).

What God is telling us is that forgiveness and love do not mean the perpetrators get away with their abuses and injustices. They don’t. If they come to faith in Christ, their sins will be covered by his blood. But if they do not come to Christ, their sins will come on their own head, and God will see that justice is done. In this way, a life of love and forgiveness—a life of treating bad people better than they deserve—is not a foolish life. God’s mercy and vengeance frees us from the soul-destroying bitterness of hatred and anger and blaming and vengeance. It makes us merciful without making us naïve about evil.

he's alive forever

Paul Beasley-Murray in The Message of the Resurrection:

Of first and basic importance is that the gospel centres on a life, namely the risen life of Christ. Without the resurrection of Jesus the death of Jesus would have no meaning and the cross would be devoid of its power. The crucified Christ whom Paul preached is the crucified and risen Lord.

The uniqueness of the resurrection of Jesus does not lie just in his coming back to life, miraculous as that was. Jesus was no Lazarus, who came back to life only to die again. No, the uniqueness of the resurrection of Jesus lies in his having been raised to life and being alive for ever. Jesus is alive, and will be for all eternity.

Because he is alive, not only sin but also death have been dealt with for ever. The resurrection of Jesus is the only hope for mortal men and women.

(via)

leadership

Peter Drucker in The Leader of the Future:

Some unambiguous lessons about leadership

• The first is that there may be "born leaders," but there surely are far too few to depend on them. Leadership must be learned and can be learned.
• The second major lesson is that "leadership personality," "leadership style," and "leadership traits" do not exist. ... The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no "charisma" and little use either for the term or for what it signifies.

What leaders know

All the effective leaders I have encountered-both those I worked with and those I merely watched-knew four simple things:

• The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers. Some people are thinkers. Some are prophets. Both roles are important and badly needed. But without followers, there can be no leaders.
• An effective leader is not someone who is loved or admired. He or she is someone whose followers do the right things. Popularity is not leadership. Results are.
• Leaders are highly visible. They therefore set examples.
• Leadership is not rank, privileges, titles, or money. It is responsibility.

What leaders do

Regardless of their almost limitless diversity with respect to personality, style, abilities, and interests, the effective leaders I have met, worked with, and observed also behaved much the same way:

• They did not start out with the question, "What do I want?" They started out asking, "What needs to be done?"
• Then they asked, "What can and should I do to make a difference?" This has to be something that both needs to be done and fits the leader's strengths and the way she or he is most effective.
• They constantly asked, "What are the organization's mission and goals? What constitutes performance and results in this organization?"
• They were extremely tolerant of diversity in people and did not look for carbon copies of themselves. It rarely even occurred to them to ask, "Do I like or dislike this person?" But they were totally-fiendishly-intolerant when it came to a person's performance, standards, and values.
• They were not afraid of strength in their associates. They gloried in it. Whether they had heard of it or not, their motto was what Andrew Carnegie wanted to have put on his tombstone: "Here lies a man who attracted better people into his service than he was himself."
• One way or another, they submitted themselves to the "mirror test"-that is, they made sure that the person they saw in the mirror in the morning was the kind of person they wanted to be, respect, and believe in. This way they fortified themselves against the leader's greatest temptations-to do things that are popular rather than right and to do petty, mean, sleazy things.

Finally, these effective leaders were not preachers; they were doers. In the mid-1920s, when I was in my high school years, a whole spate of books on World War I and its campaigns suddenly appeared in English, French, and German. For our term project, our excellent history teacher - himself a badly wounded war veteran - told each of us to pick several of these books, read them carefully, and write a major essay on our selections. When we then discussed these essays in class, one of my fellow students said, "Every one of these books says that the Great War was a war of total military incompetence. Why was it?" Our teacher did not hesitate a second but shot right back, "Because not enough generals were killed; they stayed way behind the lines and let others do the fighting and dying."

Effective leaders delegate a good many things; they have to or they drown in trivia. But they do not delegate the one thing that only they can do with excellence, the one thing that will make a difference, the one thing that will set standards, the one thing they want to be remembered for. They do it.

21 principles

Twenty-one principles for the small group leader ...

1. share life through conversational prayer and application of the Bible
2. participation is key
3. begin and close with conversational prayer
4. respond lovingly to a need - immediately
5. the Bible is the authority and guidebook
6. encourage everyone in the group
7. don’t allow doctrinal discussion that is divisive or argumentative
8. practice mutual edification
9. lead in love
10. follow-up between meetings
11. new members will keep the group alive and growing
12. handle problem people away from the group 1:1
13. don’t allow people to confess anyone else’s faults but their own
14. don’t allow anyone to do all of the talking
15. be tuned up spiritually
16. keep learning - don’t have all of the answers
17. hang loose and maintain a relaxed spirit in the group
18. have a good sense of humor
19. when you have a need, ask the group for help
20. when you have problems or need help, go to your leader
21. it’s Christ who does the leading - not us

divine nature

Peter Cockrell reminds us of CH Spurgeon's comments on 2 Pet 1.4:

To be a partaker of the divine nature is not, of course, to become God. That cannot be. The essence of Deity is not to be participated in by the creature. Between the creature and the Creator there must ever be a gulf fixed in respect of essence; but as the first man Adam was made in the image of God, so we, by the renewal of the Holy Spirit, are in a yet diviner sense made in the image of the Most High, and are partakers of the divine nature. We are, by grace, made like God. “God is love”; we become love—“He that loveth is born of God.” God is truth; we become true, and we love that which is true: God is good, and he makes us good by his grace, so that we become the pure in heart who shall see God. Moreover, we become partakers of the divine nature in even a higher sense than this—in fact, in as lofty a sense as can be conceived, short of our being absolutely divine. Do we not become members of the body of the divine person of Christ? Yes, the same blood which flows in the head flows in the hand: and the same life which quickens Christ quickens his people, for “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” Nay, as if this were not enough, we are married unto Christ. He hath betrothed us unto himself in righteousness and in faithfulness, and he who is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Oh! marvellous mystery! we look into it, but who shall understand it? One with Jesus—so one with him that the branch is not more one with the vine than we are a part of the Lord, our Saviour, and our Redeemer! While we rejoice in this, let us remember that those who are made partakers of the divine nature will manifest their high and holy relationship in their intercourse with others, and make it evident by their daily walk and conversation that they have escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. O for more divine holiness of life!

coexist?

Melinda Penner on coexisting ...

[L]ogic is a universal, basic feature of the way people think. Everyone uses logic everyday in everything they do. Contradictory claims can't both be true - it can't both be day and night at the same time in the same way. It's not a surprise to people who take religious claims seriously that their claims of reality are mutually exclusive. They can't all be true. To point that out isn't even yet to claim which one is true - or that any of them is true - just that they can't all be true.

The poster does add Jesus' claim that He's the only way, but that is in the Bible and it's obviously what Christianity claims - otherwise we wouldn't be Christians.

The poster doesn't suggest that we can't coexist, just that we can't all be right and Christians believe what Jesus said. That is what follows from logic and true tolerance: We believe we're right, but respect the people we disagree with.

Actually, the "coexist" bumper sticker is much more offensive because it asserts a particular religious view that most of the religions symbolized on it disagree with. The bumper sticker implies that all religions are equally true - something most religions reject. So it begins by denying the fundamental claims of most religions. And it suggests that if we don't accept that view of religious pluralism that we can't get along and "coexist." It suggests that if we take our religious claims seriously, we are sowing seeds of hostility. That's a pretty controversial suggestion.

And how about the response to the "Contradict" poster by those who apparently have the "Coexist" view of religious pluralism? When a Christian offers something logical and reflecting his beleif, the resopnse isn't very tolerant or coexist-like.

The irony is that "Contradict" makes a simple logical and Biblical claim that should be obvious. "Coexist" actually makes a controversial claim. But the reaction is exactly opposite.

marrying angels

RC Sproul on Who Are the Sons and Daughters of Men in Genesis 6.1-5? Crud - I sort of fancied the whole fallen angel theory ...

“When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” — Genesis 6:1-5

There are several competing theories on this admittedly peculiar text, a few of them fantastic, at least one of them rather pedestrian, ordinary. Some suggest, for instance, that what is happening here is that angels, typically fallen angels or demons, are intermarrying with human women. My position is the far more pedestrian one, but one that carries with it an important lesson.

First, why I reject this more fantastic view. Angels, whether fallen or not, and though I am happy to concede they can appear in human form, are spirit beings. They have no bodies. Most of the time most of us remember this, though here some seem to forget. Because angels are spirit beings they are not equipped to consummate a marriage and to sire offspring. Demons can do all sorts of shocking and even frightening things. This, however, is not one of them. They can’t bring forth giants because they simply can’t bring forth.

When we consider the context of this text we can better understand what Moses is explaining. In previous chapters we are given a glimpse of two competing lines, the godly line of Seth and the wicked line of Cain. Having established the antithesis in the garden, after affirming that there would be a constant struggle between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent we are given snapshot pictures of each of these armies. We see Seth’s line about the business of exercising dominion, in submission to the Lord. We see Cain’s line dishonoring the law of God and making names for themselves. But the future is not mere co-existence between the two lines. The drama builds toward the great crisis of Noah’s flood right here in chapter 6. The great change, what creates the great downward spiral of humanity on the earth is that the two lines come together as one. That is, the godly line of Seth, the sons of God, seeing how attractive are the daughters of men, the wicked line of Cain, decide to take them as wives. The end result, however, isn’t mere dilution. It’s not that the now joined line becomes morally lukewarm, but that evil spreads, grows, deepens. This shouldn’t surprise as for as Chuck Swindoll reminds us, if you drop a white glove in the mud, the mud doesn’t get all glovey.

What we see is salt losing its savor. We see what becomes of intermarrying not with a different race, but a different covenant, or a different faith. What we see is what happens when we are unequally yoked. Nothing, of course, has changed. When the children of God find the world attractive, when we determine to yoke ourselves to it, calamity comes. The world does not get any better, but the church, no longer a light on the hill, becomes much worse, and darkness falls upon the land. We are no longer useful for anything and find ourselves trampled upon the ground.