Saturday Quotes #1

Every Saturday I plan to present to you direct quotes from books I have read.

Today I present to you selections from the first 2 chapters of Timothy Keller's Generous Justice. Maybe next Saturday I will post more from the book.

The Bible is seen by many as a great hindrance in doing justice work. I am so thankful for this book because it lays out how and why the Bible actually is a fundamental source for promoting justice and compassion for those in need. My view of the Bible is renewed and I am excited to read passages that I had at once thought to be excessively boring. And this new insight from the Bible is not just intellectually stimulating. I am surprised and so humbled that it sometimes pours out of me as if I were just a pitcher of water. I want to work for justice because a God who I am in love with is all about it!

Okay, here are the quotes I found to be most striking in the first two chapters:

"Israel was charged [in Old Testament times] to create a culture of social justice for the poor and vulnerable because it was the way the nation could reveal God's glory and character to the world.

"...if you are trying to live a life in accordance with the Bible, the concept and call to justice are inescapable. We do justice when we give all human beings their due as creations of God. Doing justice includes not only righting of wrongs, but generosity and social concern, especially toward the poor and vulnerable. This kind of life reflects the character of God."

"God often tells the Israelites to lend to the poor without interest and to distribute goods to the needy and to defend the fatherless, because, "the LORD your God...defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing (Deuteronomy 10:17-18)."

Referencing Deuteronomy 15:7-8
"The poor man was not to be given merely a token "handout." Rather, credit and help were to be extended until he was completely out of poverty. The generosity extended to the poor could not be cut off until the poor person's need was gone and until he reached a level of self-sufficiency. Now we can understand how the passage could say, "There should be no poor among you." God's concern for the poor is so strong that he gave Israel a host of laws that, if practiced, would have virtually eliminated any permanent underclass."

"Any large-scale improvement in a society's level of poverty will come through a comprehensive array of public and private, spiritual, personal, and corporate measures...

"The three causes of poverty, according to the Bible, are oppression, calamity, and personal moral failure."

The Frailty of Life

I got a call today with second-hand news that my dad got into a car accident. The grave tone on the other end from a dear friend told me that the rumors he had heard wasn't just pertaining to a fender-bender.

I wanted to throw-up. And then I went numb.

I tried to call my dad's phone as fast as I could. The pleasantries of saying 'I'll call you back when I know more,' and the time it took for our cell phones to connect was an excruciatingly long eternity.

Life is terrifyingly fragile I thought.

My dad picked up the phone. He was okay. We quickly moved to call other family members to check on their safety in case this news just had the first name mixed up. I held my breath before each one picked up. These verses came to mind as painful reminders of our reality in life:

James 4:13-14
1 Peter 1:24-25
James 1:9-11

Everyone is okay as far as we can tell now at the moment. It drives home the point though that I know in one sense but I often forget or do not feel as real.

Our lives are very fragile... and we will find a bitter end if we put too much stock into our life, if we put all of our hopes into it.

Life will betray us. In a moment, a call can confirm it's frailty.

The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). This is our lot.

In John 11, their is a story of Jesus bellowing with rage against death at the funeral of Lazarus. (Most translations soften the anger of Jesus in John 11. Look at the Greek wording if you want to verify all of this.) He is not simply crying for his friend. He knows he is able and will raise him from the dead in minutes. At the moment he sees the devastation of death. He sees everyone at the funeral torn apart. We cry out, 'It should not be this way!!' at the funeral of a friend or a family member.

The utter devastation of death makes Jesus bellow with rage. He knows that it was indeed not supposed to be this way. As God in man he might have seen the funerals we have all attended at that moment, and the ones that we still will yet. At the very least in the face of death there he bellowed with rage and demanded to see the body. With his voice the Word of God penetrated through death and brought Lazarus back to life. For the sake of those around him he revealed his credibility, his prowess over life itself which was destined to be consummated on the cross.

And this is what drove him to finish his course. This is what kept his eyes set on what the cross would bring. In his death he was able to swallow up death's power on those that desperately cling to His grace. In love he took death, the wage we deserve, head on, so that we might have life in full.

Thank God for a savior... one who in perfect love lived and died to save us from the destruction of death.

How Can We Make This Assurance Operative In Our Own Lives? Part 3b

Romans 8:28-39

(2) You also have to personalize the assurance in Jesus...

When people believe that God loves them and nothing can separate them from that love... A critic may ask - where does the love come from? Is it simply an abstract idea? I think the Christian can point to Jesus in a concrete way and say that He IS the love of God.

In the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross, all of the greatest forces in the universe set their sights against Jesus. He could have stopped the rejection, the torture, the death, and the eternal justice for our sins from coming down on his head by simply giving up on us. All he had to do was walk away. But as Jesus Christ was up on the cross nailed, bleeding, dying, and looking down on the people betraying him, and in the greatest act of love in the history of time, HE STAYED.

Bomb after bomb was coming down on Jesus to try and get him to drop us and to separate him from us, but even hell itself was unable to do it. He stayed. He held on to us and became our savior. He died for us. That is how we know that nothing can separate us from the love of God. And this assurance does not have to be an abstract idea for the Christian. Because incredibly God doesn’t just love us unconditionally, he loves us counter-conditionally. He loves you against conditions because of Jesus.

When you see that Jesus Christ never let YOU go no matter what came down on him then the assurance of his love can be personalized. And I think that is the only way that you can know with absolute certainty that no matter you do inside and what happens outside that God has not abandoned you.

If he wouldn’t abandon us on the cross, when hell itself was coming down on him, then he certainly would not abandon us now! If that couldn’t separate us from him do you think you having a bad week is going to do it? Do you think there is anything WE can do when hell couldn’t even destroy his love for us? When bad things are happening to us from all around and you say, ‘I must be abandoned!’ You must remember that if he didn’t abandon you then he is certainly not going to abandon you now. God’s SON was not even spared. And if he wouldn’t spare his son (think of giving up your own son, daughter, nephew, niece, brother, sister) to give us the ultimate gift of community with him and overwhelming love from him, do you think he is really going to let your life go off the rails now? He is not going to deny you anything you need.

If somebody spends a billions dollars on a present do you think he is going to skimp on the wrapping paper?

This is the love you have been looking for all of your life. No friend love, no married love, no popular acclaim, no parental love, no respect at work will give you what this will give you.

Even the best spouse, friends, and parents will die. You will be forsaken. But nothing, neither death, life, angels, principalities, powers, things present, or anything to come, nor height, depth, or anything in all creation will be able to separate you from the love of God, which is in Jesus.

Are you certain of that?

How Can We Make This Assurance Operative In Our Own Lives? Part 3a

Romans 8:28-39

Many people in America, inside and outside of the church, hold to a belief in a loving God. They all say that they believe in a God of love, a God that loves unconditionally and loves you no matter what you do...

But is the assurance changing lives?

This assurance will not change your life when God’s love is simply an abstract, cognitive belief. I believe this assurance can only change your life when it becomes 'personalized.'

I think you have to personalize the love of God in two ways. I will write about the first - the assured love of God in you - today and the second - the assured love of God in Christ - tomorrow.

How do you personalize this assurance in you?

It is fine to talk about how freewill and the sovereignty of God is only an apparent contradiction (I wrote about that yesterday). That is fine but it is only an intellectual exercise. We need to apply this to us and our relationship with God.

Do you have a relationship with God? Have you gone to God through Jesus Christ? What does that look like?

Think of a relationship with God as a door. As you are coming up to the door you see above it Matthew 10:32, “Whosoever will confess me before men I will confess before my Father.” In other words, as you are coming up to a relationship with God you are told you have got to do it. You have to make a decision and a commitment. You cannot be passive.

If you bite and cry out, ‘Lord accept me because of what Jesus has done,’ and you walk through the door, the minute you do you see behind you on the other side of the door John 15:16, “You have not chosen me I have chosen you,” and John 6:44, “no man can come to me except the Father draw him.”

Everybody, I believe, who has moved through that door will someday realize that in spite of all of the work that they did and the sweat it took to make the commitment, when they get in and start looking back they will begin to realize that the reason they are a Christian is not because they were more spiritual, more humble then other people, more of a lover of truth then other people... it was simply because God kept pushing and pressing and persistently seeking to love them until he broke them open to him. Therefore, what makes me a Christian is simply the fact that God comes to the Christian, not because they were smarter, better, more repentant, or spiritual. It is both a free AND a sovereign act.

I wrote about Deuteronomy 7:6-8 one time on this blog after hearing Tim Keller speak on it.

Read that passage. Do you see the circular reasoning? God is saying that He didn't love Israel because they were one of the great nations, in fact they were the one of the smallest and had very little going for them. It was because God loved them that he brought them out of Egypt... God is saying to His people here (the nation of Israel then, and now to His people across all borders) that, 'I love you, just because I love you, just because I love you.'

Dani (my wife) might ask me someday, 'Do you love me?' And I will say, 'Yes!' And then Dani might say, 'Why?' This is where I will have to be very careful. I could truthfully say, "You the smartest girl I have ever known, the prettiest girl I have seen. I love how we can talk for hours, I love the ambition and life spark you have, I love how you want to see everything. I love how we can walk and get lost in a city and have such a great time doing it...’ But that answer will not work. I think the only answer in which you can build an entire LIFE of love is, "I love you just because I love you." And this is not just sweet talk, it is not just pillow-talk nonsense. There is no other way for true love to operate.

If you say to another human being that you love them because of a certain factor then all of the identity shifts to that factor because that is the basis for the love. 'Well, then I better keep my figure! I better stay smart! I better keep in good shape so I can keep on walking through cities... But what happens if I somehow can't walk anymore? What happens if I lose my drive and ambition?'

The basis of the identity, of this person's loveliness, the basis of their value is then shifted to these factors, and then slavery to those factors if they seek to remain in that love... But what if God says, 'I love you just because I love you'. And what if the only way we love him is because he kept after us until he finally broke us open... This reality can transform a life.

Why?

It is because finally with this assurance you don’t have to be smart, sophisticated, fun, good looking, or have a lot of money. Those factors are marginalized now because you are finally loved for yourself! If you know the reason why God, people, or your spouse loves you is because... you have a great career, then you will never be able to handle a reversal of that career... or that you are talented, then you will never be able to truly handle competition and failure...

The divine, sovereign, electing grace of God tells us that He loves you just because He loves you. If that assurance is personalized it can transform you.

A Controversial Assurance? Part 2

Romans 8:28-39

Paul is saying at the end of Romans 8 that there is an assurance that we can have that can absolutely change a life through Christ. But when Paul expresses this assurance we (in a modern-western culture) raise a question. It is very hard in our culture to even receive this assurance that Paul is talking about... to enjoy it and to use it unimpeded.

In our modern-western culture this assurance raises an issue. All of this talk, I will start explaining in the next paragraph, brings up controversial topics like predestination, calling, and election. This bothers us, but as it bothers us I hope we do not forget that other centuries and other cultures have not been bothered by it.
This is a problem for modern-western, enlightenment individualistic people. It is wise to identify the lenses by which we see the world. We must never absolutize any of our objections that our specific to our culture because they always arrive from within our culture. The objections should always be taken seriously because we live within that culture, but we must relativize them because we are not the only culture in the world and therefore should never declare that any cultural objection is an insurmountable obstacle to faith in Christ.

What is the controversy?

When modern-western people (a group which I am of course a part of) hear, ‘Christ will keep you in his love, so that no matter what we do we will never stop loving him and he will never stop loving us, and he is in total control of everything so that everything is working out according to his plan.’ The response could be something like, ‘What about freewill because it sounds like then that God would be doing all of this stuff despite our choices, and if that is the case, then what about human responsibility? What does it matter how we live then if this is true? If it is true and I am a Christian, then can I do anything because God is going to keep me loving him? And if he is going to work out everything into his plan, then what does it matter what I do? What happens to the responsibility of the choices I make?’

These are very good questions.

Today, in this theological debate, we are only given two alternatives to choose from: either we believe that we have freewill and are responsible for our choices and our choices matter, which means that the future is open and undetermined, OR something has set and fixed the future and our choices don’t matter.

But is this an either/or debate?

I think, in the Bible, we are not given a choice between one or the other. It seems to always be, in the Bible, that you are free and responsible for your choices and your choices matter and no one is forcing you to make those choices AND YET every single thing that happens as a result of those choices is working out according to the plan of God. It is not just that God foresees what you are going to do, but rather what you do fits perfectly into the plan he wants and the course he wants history to take.

Here are a few examples of this is in the Bible (there are many more).

The principle of it can be seen in Proverbs 16:1, “To man belongs the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue,” and verse 9, “the heart of man plans his way, but it is the Lord who establishes his steps.” To you belongs the plans of the heart, but the result of the plan comes from God. To you belongs your plans, but when you actually speak or act that ALWAYS fits in with God’s plan. This is amazing. On one hand, your choices belong to you, they are yours and are not coerced and not accomplished or chosen by God and you cannot say you could not help it. You are free and responsible. And yet, the result is always exactly what God wants.

How can this be?

This does not have to be an either/or debate. Isn’t possible that God could fix things and work things out and at the same time not violate your freewill. We might not be able to imagine how we could do it but the question is can GOD do it?

J.I. Packer wrote once, “The relationship of our freewill and responsibility and God’s sovereignty and control of all things is... not a contradiction but an apparent contradiction.” He uses an example of light to explain this. We know that light sometimes behaves as waves and sometimes as particles. Sometimes it acts as if it does not consist of matter and sometimes it acts as if it does. How can this be? We reason that it should not be like this but it is. We do not know how it works, he says, but we know it does work this way and so we work with it, otherwise you are not going to know how to handle light. Just like our knowledge of light, J.I. Packer says, this debate is not a contradiction but an apparent contradiction since we do not have the knowledge to figure and reason everything out.

On the one hand, God is setting and fixing absolutely everything the way he wants it to be. He does not do it despite our choices, but through them. Our choices are part of his plan.

Another example of this put into practice is seen in Acts 27. For the sake of brevity see how this works out in the passage for yourself, but simply put, Paul has a biblical understanding of this debate here. Our choices matter absolutely, but they do not determine the future. Because they matter Paul is not passive in life, he says let’s do things the way they should be done (by trusting God, I think in the case in Acts 27), but because they (his choices) do not determine the future, he is not paralyzed in doubts. He is neither passive nor paralyzed. If you believe everything is fixed despite our choices you will be passive. If you believe that our choices determine our future you will become paralyzed. Paul in this case is neither.

You may say here, ‘Why would you be paralyzed if you believe that our choices determine the future?’ Everything that happens in history is interlocked in an infinite number of ways and any little change to one thing changes everything and if these changes are completely determined by us then we should be floored because we do not have even a speck of the wisdom necessary to make those choices. Take for instance the relatively modern search for a “soulmate” or “the one.” If just one person had children with someone else in the past then whole civilizations might have never have even come to pass.

We cannot possibly anticipate all of the effects and changes that our decisions make. The Bible, thankfully, tells us that we do not have to anticipate and predicate the consequences of our choices. It says on one hand that you are absolutely responsible for your choices, you are free and nobody is forcing you to do them and if you make bad choices there will be bad consequences, BUT God is the one in charge of the future and he is overruling everything so you can do your best and then relax because God will see it all through...

If we truly had freewill then it very well could be paralyzing to get out of bed in the morning since we do not even have the slightest insight as to how one of our choices may devastatingly change the future. Instead though we can be sure that all things work together for good for those that love God, even though it is all very intricate and we very rarely see how it all works out.

Here is my best attempt for us to get more of a glimpse: What would have happened if my great, great grandparents decided only to have eleven children instead of twelve? What would have happened if my grandma’s first husband would have come home alive from the war? What if John Wilkes Booth was stopped before he shot Abraham Lincoln? What if one man decided to launch a nuclear bomb during the Cold War? What would have happened if I had decided not to have become a lifeguard my Sophomore year of High School in which I met my future wife for the first time, which then led to, years later, meeting up with her again and eventually marrying her?

An infinite amount of ‘big’ moments in the past are made up of a difference of inches or seconds or small decisions, which are interwoven in infinitely complex ways that make up our future today... I think a question we have to seriously ask ourselves is: do we think the inches and seconds, that make all of the difference, happen by accident?

The Bible says that ALL things work together for good for those that love God and are called according to his purpose.

Very seldom do we even get a glimpse of how God is working all things together for the good of those that love him, but he is and therefore you can be assured that no matter what bad stuff is happening inside of you and outside of you he has not abandoned you and he loves you.

An Assurance that Can Change Everything

Romans 8 talks about how Jesus concretely changes your life when He comes into it...

I wanted to focus on the ending of the chapter in a few blog posts - a section that has a very simple, but life-altering point.

Paul is saying that there is an assurance that we can have that can absolutely change your life through Christ. He is saying that this assurance is a thing you can get out everyday and use.

Romans 8:28-39

Today I wanted to write about WHAT the assurance that Paul talks about is, tomorrow WHY we can be assured, and a day after that HOW we can be assured (or HOW we can make this assurance not just an abstraction but an operative thing in our lives)...

WHAT WE CAN BE ASSURED OF in Romans 8:

What is Paul’s point? There is a joy to be had and if you have it, it can enable you to face anything in life without sinking or crumbling. This joy is a certainty that God doesn’t JUST love you now (it is a certainty that he loves you now in Christ), but that he ALWAYS will. It also assures that nothing can shake you from that or separate you from that. The Lord of the universe does not just love you now but always will.

Once you have connected with God through Jesus Christ this assurance is two folded. It means that God loves you no matter what bad stuff is happening inside of you AND no matter what bad stuff is happening outside of you. No matter what happens you can be assured that God still loves you.

Sometimes we do awful things. There is stuff in your heart (mine I am sure more so) that you don’t know about yet and that when it pops up you will say, ‘I cannot believe that I am capable of that!’ When this happens you are going to be very disillusioned and mad at yourself... you could possibly say in response, ‘I can’t believe that God could love me after I have done that...’ And yet here is Paul saying, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus who died and more then that was raised and is ever at the right hand of God interceding for us...” Not one thing you can possibly do today can bring you back into condemnation. It is ALL covered, it is ALL paid for. When real bad stuff happens inside of us we say, ‘Look at the mess I am in, God could not love me.’ But we are given an assurance here in Romans 8 that says God loves you no matter how much or what kind of bad stuff happens inside of you.

On the other fold, when bad stuff happens to us we say, ‘Look what a mess life is, obviously God has abandoned me’ or ‘There can’t be a loving God!’ But Paul says here, ‘Oh yes there can be.’ Do you see this list in Romans 8: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword... Whenever this bad stuff happens, when everything is going wrong you could feel either that God doesn’t love you, because he would not let all of this stuff happen to me or a loving God is not there. But no matter how bad the mess is on the outside Paul says that you still can be assured that God loves you. He says in verse 28, “All things are working together for good for those that love God.” What does that mean? I think it means taken together, as a whole, looked at from the long-term, in every single thing that happens God is working together into a plan for our good and (as the Bible says) God’s glory.

Let me share two examples from the Bible that displays this principle. They both are found in the Old Testament at a place called Dothan. In Genesis, a man named Joseph is thrown into a pit by his brothers for the purpose of selling him into slavery. He is looking at a whole life of suffering in front of him as he cries out to God to save him. But God is silent and he is sold into slavery and has a horrible life for many years... Many centuries later in Dothan a man named Elisha prays to God. By this time Dothan is a city and it is besieged by an enemy. Elisha cries out to God to save the city from capture. This time God acts, wipes out the enemy army and the city is saved...

If you know the story of Joseph you know that if he hadn’t been sold into slavery and hadn’t gone through all of those years of misery, not only hundreds of thousands of people would have died from famine, but his own family would have been destroyed by their own sin. What all of that means is that God was just as actively working everything for good in Joseph’s life as he was in Elisha’s. He was just as actively working in the seeming slowness and non-answer to Joseph as in the swift noisy answer to Elisha. Paul says that this is ALWAYS the case. No matter how much bad stuff is happening inside or outside of you, you can be assured that God absolutely and infallibly and unchangeably loves you.

When Paul gets to the very end of chapter 8 in Romans he says that he is “absolutely certain.” He uses a word here that means, ‘absolute, intense certainty and persuasion.’ And then he just bursts, pushes and stretches to the limits of possible language to say, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor power, nor heaven, nor hell, nor height, nor death... nothing! can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

There are people, though, who have looked at this passage and have said, ‘Oh yes, but... you can separate yourself from God because if you start out to follow Jesus and you turn back you can lose your salvation and lose his love.’ This is not the right way to read this text because Paul specifically states that CREATION cannot separate us from the love of God. We are all apart of creation last time I checked! Paul is trying to say here that EVERY possible situation that might turn you away from God cannot - even persecution or torture if you want to take it there. God’s love is so powerful that it will keep you facing him, keep you loving him, keep you in his arms - no matter what.

Here is our assurance: no matter how powerful the evil inside of us or outside of us, it is unable to separate us from the love of God. Once you give yourself to God through Christ he is yours, you are his, and NOTHING ever can change that.