Santa Pause

I expect to resume blogging on January 2, although I may indeed post something before then. Now turn off your computer and go enjoy your family!

Worldview Series: Ground Rule #1

This series is written more rhetorically than apologetically, i.e., I will not buttress every point with Scripture links, but will make my appeal with some emotion, assuming that you, my reader, are a modern Berean, willing to check the Scriptures for yourself to see if my claims are accurate. If I wanted to teach, I'd provide the links, but I simply want to provoke you, to righteousness if possible, but I'll settle for simply provoking you. Period.

Ground Rule #1: God is God and no one else is God."

You'd think the words "God is God" would be enough, but I have added "and no one else is God," because of the common evangelical misperception that Satan is running a really close second. Nothing illustrates the point better than a story from Colorado Springs.

I was there speaking in a good friend's church, spicing my message as usual with stories from the Soviet Union (which President Reagan recently had aptly labeled the "Evil Empire"). Afterward I stood in front of the podium chatting with local folks to thank them for coming, as well as to clarify any point someone might have misunderstood. One lady approached me with a question:

She: "Do you ever get over those shaky knees?"
Yours Truly: "What do you mean?"
She: "You know, nervousness. I mean, after all, you spend a lot of time behind enemy lines!"
Yours Truly: "Oh ma'am, I'm not the one behind enemy lines when I go to the USSR. No, it's the KGB; they are the ones behind enemy lines. If the earth is the Lord's, then I'm just touring His inheritance!"

Then I added: "Besides, sinners are where you find them. Why, there are people living right across the street from this church building who need the Lord just like those Russians in Moscow."

To which she replied: "Yes, well we know Satan is everywhere."

Being a smart aleck -- I think it's a genuine calling from God - with a barely intact smattering of self control, I almost replied "Well, praise his name!" Almost. But I held onto my tongue and the urge to blow her socks off, and rather gently pointed out that Satan is not omnipresent. That is a quality belonging only to God.

I'm telling you the story only because that woman expressed explicitly what millions of evangelicals believe implicitly: That Satan is godlike, a Darth Vader to Jesus' sweet little Luke Skywalker. They think the battle of the ages is a close one, that Jesus was almost down for the ten count when, at the last moment (probably to the Rocky theme), He sprang up and out of the grave, hopping from foot to foot, wiping a little blood away with the nub of a mitt, ready to kick the devil's patoot.

But that isn't the case. The reality is much more, well, not exactly boring but very predictable. Here are the historical facts:

God has never had an off day. He has never been surprised. Not by Eve's sin, nor by the serpent's presence in the garden. He has always had a plan and has always executed His "duties" perfectly (a record not even Rush Limbaugh can match).

God knew when He commanded the First Couple to "be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule" that they wouldn't pull it off, that they would blow the whole deal right away. But that was okay, because He intended "before the foundations of the world" that His first "great commission" would be fulfilled not by Adam and his wife, but by Christ and His bride. In other words, the Church is not Plan B because Adam failed or because the Jews blew their chance. We were God's intention from the beginning, right there at the genesis in Genesis.

Modern evangelicals, especially the "Left Behind" crowd, tend to believe de facto that a certain parity exists between heaven and hell, which is why they are willing to settle for historical détente with the devil, believing that victory will be achieved only after Jesus kicks some more you-know-what at Armageddon. Until then many are resigned to circle the wagons of holiness and sing "hold the fort for I am coming." (If you're not a hymn-singing Protestant, you should know that we actually came up with that insipid song. And even worse is one called "Standing Somewhere in the Shadows" [you'll find Jesus]. So help me, I'd rather the choir break wind in unison with full reverb that to sit through that odious ode.)

God is God. That is the basic fact of the universe. It should be the beginning of every scientific theory, the foundation of every business endeavor, the first plank of every political platform, the basis of every educational curriculum. Comprehension of this fact is what fundamentally sets humans apart from animals.

This idea has real-world implications. Let's not be subtle: Any school course that begins somewhere other than "In the beginning God..." is off on the wrong foot. Any science that refuses to acknowledge it is false science (Romans 1:19). Any philosophy that denies it is mere sophistry, an academic love affair with death.

The bottom line is this: If what I've said is undeniable, if you can affirm these claims intellectually, then why not affirm them with your life? The foundation of a Christian worldview, i.e., a true worldview, is this one: God is God, and second place does not exist.

How I Figured Out the Whole World (and Stayed Humble)

This series is written more rhetorically than apologetically, i.e., I will not buttress every point with Scripture links, but will make my appeal with some emotion, assuming that you, my reader, are a modern Berean, willing to check the Scriptures for yourself to see if my claims are accurate. If I wanted to teach, I'd provide the links, but I simply want to provoke you, to righteousness if possible, but I'll settle for simply provoking you. Period.

Those words will preface each article in this series. I'll post Ground Rule #1 either this afternoon from home or tomorrow from Baltimore. The second article may follow before New Years Day, but probably not. I'd really like to ignore computers for a few days in an e-fast of sorts, and that might be good for you too.

Please allow me to explain how I arrived at my worldview outline. This is the theological basis for all the smart-alecky rhetoric to follow.

I have outlined a Christian worldview in seven "Ground Rules," seven principles in logical sequence, based on insights from Dr. Ray Sutton, whose seminal work on covenants, "That You May Prosper," first came to my attention in the late 1980s. Sutton pointed out, as had others before him (such as Meredith Kline), that Moses employed a "suzerainty treaty" format in writing the Pentateuch. Ancient suzerains, regional kingdoms where a conquering king had subjugated lesser kingdoms, operated in terms of treaties written from the conquering king to his vassal kings (making him a "king of kings"). Over time such treaties settled into a popular fourfold or fivefold format. Sutton claimed Moses used five points, structured as follows:

• An opening statement of sovereignty.
  
• The historical prologue, which not only recounted how the new governmental order had come into effect, but also spelled out the resulting new hierarchy.
  
• The laws of the kingdom.
  
• The oath that ratified the treaty. It contained a list of sanctions for keeping or breaking the laws, i.e., judgment. It usually took the form of a "self-maledictory" oath, sort of like the old "May lightening strike me dead if I'm lying" line that our moms ordered us never to say.
  
• Terms of succession, i.e., how the kingdom would continue in future generations, often a restatement on the continuity of the laws.

In short, these five elements communicated the principles of:

• Transcendence and Immanence, the king above us and with us.
  
• Hierarchy or Representative Authority.
  
• Ethics or Law.
  
• Oath, i.e., the principle of judgment.
  
• Succession, the principle of continuity and inheritance.

(N.B. Look carefully and you'll see the acronym THEOS in these five points.)

An even shorter "pop" version would be:

• Who's in charge.
  
• His pecking order.
  
• The laws of life in his land.
  
• What happens if we keep 'em or break 'em.
  
• His plans for our future.

What does this look like in terms of a biblical covenant? How about:

• God usually began speaking with Moses by saying something like, "I AM THAT I AM," or simply "I AM the Lord," declarations of sovereignty.
  
• The historical prologue is the story of redemption, e.g., " I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (hierarchy), Who brought you out of the land of Egypt (redemption)." It's interesting that God could simply have told a tale of conquering, but instead chose to conquer by redeeming a people for Himself!
  
• Laws. 613 of them.
  
• The oaths on the two mountains, one invoking blessing and one invoking curses, in Deuteronomy 28.
  
• The promises of the covenant.

These principles also inform the overall structure of the Pentateuch:

• Genesis presents the Transcendent, Immanent Creator.
  
• Exodus is the story of the conquering Redeemer, choosing a people to represent Him to the nations of the earth.
  
• Leviticus contains the laws.
  
• Numbers, the "book of wanderings," is the tale of God's judgment (and mercy) on Israel in the wilderness.
  
• Deuteronomy recounts the entrance of the new generation into their land of promise, and reiterates the law, hence the name Deuteronomy, or "second giving of the law."

It would be fun to show how these principles also imprint the Ten Commandments, Jesus' five sermons in Matthew, the "creation mandate," Great Commission, and other parts of Scripture. But that isn't our purpose. It is worth noting, however, that these points should not be viewed superstitiously, like the keys to finding Atlantis or figuring out the pyramids. Rather, they merely represent the way God thinks about us. He is logical and consistent in His relationship to man; everything He does to and for us is done in terms of the Covenant He established in and with Jesus in our behalf. Thus it is no stretch to think of this structure as the "logic of God" in dealing with humanity.

At least it's no stretch for me.

So how did I get seven points out of five? I just extended the middle one (Ethics/Law) into three. My seven once again:

• God is God, and no one else is God (Transcendence/Immanence).
  
• Jesus Christ has been crowned King of all the earth, everyone therein, and everything they do (Hierarchy/Representative Authority).
  
• All of the Bible is authoritative for all of life (Ethics/Law).
  
• Righteousness works (Extension of #3).
  
• Sin doesn't work (Extension of #3).
  
• Judgment happens (Oath/Sanction).
  
• The meek shall inherit the earth (Succession/Inheritance).

I believe the Christian ethos is outlined therein, from the creation, through history, to eternity. It is, in essence, a timeline showing how Christ Jesus builds His church and conquers the nations, in order to present the Kingdom to the Father. Is this not history's only purpose?

Next post, finally, is "Ground Rule #1."

Peter Jackson - Lord of the Things

I had decided to wait until after Christmas to start my worldview series called "The Ground Rules," but blogging friend Hoots is pointing people this way, so I'll put up the first article tomorrow, and the rest after Christmas. In the meantime, there are other fish, or in this case apes, to fry.

I saw Peter Jackson's King Kong last night and am still thoroughly wrung out this morning. While it isn't the best movie ever, it is easily one of the most fantastically made. In fact, I agree with Joe Carter's 10 Second Movie Review that Kong's special effects "are so painstakingly rendered that they make the dinosaurs in Jurrassic (sic) Park look like claymation figures."

The biggest problem with the film is the fact that the cutting room floor was left too bare. I can just hear the editors saying "Oh, we've got to leave that in; it's just too good to cut," about fifty times too many.

Casting was quite good: Jack Black played the lying, conniving, Barnum-directs-movies wannabe to irritating perfection, a surprise because I had thought him too young for the role. Naomi Watts established herself as a good actress, damsel-screams and all. Adrian Brody, on the other hand, did not fare so well. The Best Actor winner is naturally doe-eyed, which gave him an artsy dreamer look as The Pianist, but in this movie those orbs turned his "look of love" into schmaltz. I got the feeling the girl could have just as easily rescue him.

Jackson did an amazing job at portraying a savage tribe, so much so that the natives came off as utterly demonized, no Linda Blair head-twisting or green slime needed.

I have never witnessed a film where the special effects were so well done as to truly suspend reality. While Spielberg's aforementioned Jurassic Park dinosaurs came off as very realistic animation, Kong's animals simply looked real. The gorilla, himself, was as convincing as if they had gotten a genuine silverback to act, surely a testament to today's high standards regarding authenticity.

That quality, in fact, provided the other real rub for me. I had no problem suspending belief as far as the oversized prehistoric creatures were concerned. But there's no way I could accept Naomi Watts climbing a ladder in her flowing little dress 101 stories above the ground, nor hanging horizontally that high up when it came unhinged, nor running to the edge to wave off the planes, nor recovering from falling and having Kong catch her. Nor her and Brody not falling when they stood atop that spire, hugging. The wind would be 40-50 mph in gusts, so even if they stood, they'd be roadkill soon enough.

I also had a bit of a problem with Watts' displays of affectionate pity for Kong, not when she first realized he was no threat to her, but in New York City, after he had killed about three dozen people.

The Empire State Building scene, which ran probably twenty minutes but seemed like an hour, was what exhausted everyone in the theater. I'm used to airplanes and heights, but I can't tell you how many times I felt my adrenalin pump through foot and thigh with the feeling that I was about to fall.

King Kong contains a few too many cinematic climaxes, which may be one reason it's not doing the box office predicted for it (Narnia being the other). But it's worth seeing anyway, although it's way too edgy for younger children. One thing is certain: The movie's various T-Rexes, giant worms, bats, and bugs make Peter Jackson the undisputed Lord of the Things.

Brother Can You Paradigm?

Joel Barker, best known as "The Paradigm Man" for his high-priced (and high-value) business seminars, made newly famous an old joke to illustrate the meaning of the phrase "paradigm shift." Here's my version:

Clive loved sliding behind the wheel of his old, green MGTD, and taking her out for a spin on the narrow, winding lanes of the Surrey countryside. He'd taken this old B-Road, one near Pirbright west of Woking, a hundred times before, and knew every curve, every perfectly trimmed hedgerow, like the palm of his hand, maybe better.

A newer car would've done just fine alternating between 2nd and 3rd gears, but the little TD needed 4th as well, and this half mile before the double ess ahead saw Clive pushing 50 on the speedo.

That's when everything went wrong, almost horribly wrong. For just as Clive had started to brake, nudging the old transmission down into second for the first curve right, a carload of screaming teenaged girls came hurdling through wide from the other direction, a full two feet onto his side of the lane. Clive instinctively jerked the wheel left, braking hard and giving thanks when the gravel stopped him instead of the tall tree a foot from his front left headlamp.

"Pig!" the girls had screamed as they careened past him, and Clive was as furious now as he had been panicked thirty seconds earlier. "Cow," he yelled at nothing in particular, stomping the accelerator and jamming the car into first, then into second, barreling right, then into the second left at nearly forty miles per hour.

That's when he hit the pig.

My figurative Brit experienced, in more ways than one, a "paradigm shift." The accusation he thought he'd heard had really been a warning.

I'm writing this to put a pig right smack in the middle of the modern Evangelical "Left Behind" road, right there at the curve where educational neutrality intersects with "judge not," where Jesus barely beats the devil at the "end of the book," and, "whew, we win!"

We experience-bred, praise-singing charismatics, Southern Baptist prophecy junkies, and "modified" Dispensationalist Pentecostals, having thrown aside Luther and Calvin for a brigade of paperback writers (who sell millions but will not be remembered), are in dire need of a paradigm shift, a shift BACK to a biblical way of looking at the world, of interpreting the "signs of the times" according to God's word rather than the headlines of the Jerusalem Post.

That's why I've ingested, digested, even indigested the subject of worldviews and what it means to hold a biblical one. The purpose of this series is not to write a tome -- there are plenty of big, heavy books full of five syllable words already keeping the masses off topic -- but to provide an outline. And in the spirit of George Barna, I'm going to reduce the universe to seven, count 'em seven, simple points, which I'll explain in full by the middle of January. Or maybe the end, if my laptop doesn't get fixed by New Year's day. (My two-month old Powerbook G4 has a bad logic board, and is being mailed from Florida to Apple on the 22nd, hopefully to find its way to Baltimore on or around the 28th. My own bad logic will also take a few days off during that time.)

Since Psalm 24 says, "the earth is the Lord's," I've decided to name these principles "The Ground Rules." Here they are:

• God is God, and no one else is God.
  
• Jesus Christ has been crowned King of all the earth, everyone therein, and everything they do.
  
• All of the Bible is authoritative for all of life.
  
• Righteousness works.
  
• Sin doesn't work.
  
• Judgment happens.
  
• The meek shall inherit the earth.

I think we Christians have bought into a bit of false advertising. Millions of us think the devil is more powerful than he is, that Lordship stops at the public schoolhouse door, that the first 39 books of the Bible count less these days, that righteousness circles the wagons and waits for Jesus while sin takes over the world, that we should be afraid of the future, and that the only way out is up.

But Jesus is no slumlord of the Rings, and the Battle of the Ages is not a squeaker. So enough subtlety on my part! Next post we'll examine Who's really calling the shots on Planet Earth. And I'll give you a hint: Satan is alive, but he is not well.

Transformed by the Removing of Our Minds

It's a fairly well-known fact that several of America's founding fathers, e.g., Franklin and Jefferson, were more deists than Christians. But it is also obvious, from their writings, that these men were very well versed -- pun intended -- in Scripture, more so, in fact, that the average pastor or seminary graduate of today.

We evangelicals seem to live by the credo that Bible is the greatest book in the world until it actually applies to our lives. But of course, how can we apply something we do not read?

Modern evangelical ignorance of Scripture, doctrine, and theology was documented anecdotally by my friend Eric Holmberg, founder of Reel to Real Ministries and The Apologetics Group. Eric, a superb theologian and expert videographer to boot, took a camera and microphone to Washington, D.C., a few years back when Promise Keepers held their "solemn assembly" for Christian men on the Mall. During that event he roamed the friendly crowd, conducting short interviews, which typically went something like this:

Eric: Hi, I'm Eric! Hey, have you ever heard of Judge Roy Moore?
Man: Uh, the name sound's familiar.
Eric: He's the Alabama judge who refuses to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom wall.
Man: Oh yeah! Okay, yes, I've heard of him.
Eric: Well, what do you think? Should Judge Moore remove the plaque, or keep it up there on the wall?
Man: He definitely ought to keep it there. The Ten Commandments are important.
Eric: Why?
Man: Well, you know, our nation, our laws, are founded on the Ten Commandments.
Eric: You think they're that important?
Man: Yes, yes I do.
Eric: Great! Can you name them?

At that point the interviewee typically began to stutter a lot, reluctantly and ashamedly answering "no," before returning to what surely must have been a prayer time of instantly greater conviction. In fact, Eric told me, out of approximately two hundred interviews, including several with pastors, only five men could accurately quote the Ten Commandments. And this from a crowd of Christian men dedicated and serious enough about their faith to journey hundreds, even thousands of miles from their homes to America's Capital.

Once on a Sunday evening I unwittingly humiliated approximately eight hundred people in a charismatic church in San Diego. The joke was innocent enough: I said, "You know what First Thessalonians says: 'Rejoice almost always. Hardly ever stop praying. In almost everything give thanks, for this is usually God's will in Christ Jesus concerning most of you.'"

The silence was deafening, and the sea of blank expressions made it clear that beyond thinking I wasn't being funny, they really did not know I was misquoting the Bible. So I suddenly found myself with an unpleasant dilemma: Should I leave them in their ignorance, and worse, possibly affirm it? Or should I quote the passage correctly and expose their ignorance, instantly embarrassing, and therefore alienating, hundreds of people? (Bear in mind, this was a self-professed "full Gospel," church, as opposed to one of those "partial" Gospel ones down the road.)

I chose the latter, partly because I did not dare leave them ignorant of God's Word, and partly because back then I thought being offensive was the mark of a prophetic gift. In any case, it worked, and I have never been invited back.

Much to blame for our ignorance is a historical disdain for theology, an antipathy traceable to a great revival commonly called the "First Great Awakening," which occurred some two-hundred seventy years ago in the New England colonies. As with all genuine movements of God throughout history, there were those who took sincere fervor to unhealthy extremes.

In this case, the revival had emphasized the truth that the Church of Jesus Christ is composed of gathered people, not bricks and mortar, and the effect of this revelation upon people up and down the Atlantic seaboard was stunning. Open-air prayer meetings (they called them "brush arbor" meetings) were common, and powerful itinerant preachers like Englishman George Whitefield persuaded thousands to follow Christ.

But in highlighting the "where two or three are gathered in My name" truth, the institutional church and its disciplines, like theology, were downplayed. In fact, thousands of Christians became self-professed "revivalists," and having been affected so deeply by their experiences with God under the ministries of relatively uneducated circuit riders, they began to view the rigid, moribund manner of their seminarian pastors as proof that theology wasn't merely unimportant, but was downright bad for the soul.

My own Pentecostal heritage, an Appalachian "holiness" brand, grew out of that era, and its continuation in two more "awakenings" in the 1800s. I remember adults who, during my childhood, made it clear that they considered the best church services the ones where the Holy Ghost moved with such power that my Dad didn't even get to preach. (I can say thankfully that Dad never thought that way and was not anti-intellectual, but that also made him a misfit in our West Virginia denominational district.) I have not-so-lovingly come to refer to that kind of spirituality as being "transformed by the removing of one's mind."

Now, rather than resolving this lament, I intend to use it as an introduction to a series of posts on the importance of a well-developed Christian "worldview," as well as my version, or at least a sketch, of what I consider a healthy one. Get ready for "The Ground Rules."

Tookie, Cain, and Abel

Thoughts about death following Tookie Williams' execution:

Death penalty opponents -- I am not among them -- if they are honest are also anti-abortion. Others, specifically those on the Left, although against capital punishment, are indulgent of assisted suicide, the "right to die," et cetera. I believe a big reason for this contradictory stance is that they do not understand the nature of death, i.e., its connection to sin, and to man's accountability to God.

Man was not meant to die. Sure, the human body digests food, bananas turn brown, and kopi luwak (civet poop) evidently makes better coffee. Decay was part of sinless creation; that kind of death was always a part of life. But humans were created in God's image, forever to reign over the earth as His vice regents. We were not created to cease.

Man's sin caused a delay in the plan, of course, as God's warning was enforced: In that day man "surely" did die, not physically, but in his relationship with the Creator, and in his dominion over the earth.

The way man dealt with his exile from Eden is both fascinating and telling, especially in the case of Adam's son, Cain. His brother Abel, whom Hebrews 11 lists as an advance believer in the promise of Christ, demonstrated an awareness that his sin required a price he could not pay, and that he needed mercy, and God justified him for it. Cain, on the other hand, tried to scrounge up an offering that would earn divine favor, an impossibility for sinful man; thus his offering was rejected. Enraged by his brother's acceptable humility, in contrast with his unacceptable vanity, Cain murdered Abel.

But there's a "rest of the story" here that a more theologically inclined Paul Harvey would have found quite revealing: God sentenced Cain to a degree of homelessness beyond that of his parents, exiling him to the land of Nod, the land of "wandering." Cain's two fold reaction to this sentence is typical of sinful man, and sets up my point.

First, the Bible says he "settled" in Nod, that is, he tried to overcome the terms of his sentence. How can a man ever "settle" in the land of wandering, a land of no settling? Second, it says he built a city (the language indicates that it was a fortified place), and named it after his son, Enoch.

This is the first mention of a city in Scripture and one can see immediately that in building it sinful man was competing with God, whose eternal plan has always been a City of His own. Cain was, in essence, attempting to build his own substitute for Paradise lost, trying to regain the Garden on his own terms. But where God's garden had been bordered naturally, Cain's city was fortified. (Think of it as history's first set of locked doors.) And in a vain attempt to extend his influence beyond death, he named the city after his son.

This is the nature of man, to attempt to "settle up" with ultimacy on his own terms, avoiding accountability at all costs. Cain fortified himself, not merely against fellow sinners, but against reckoning with God. And though different historical eras have seen the human rebellion play itself out in myriad ways, man in any epoch will attempt to insulate himself from the awful reality of his spiritual exile and its consequences. So how does sinful man deal with death in particular? In a variety of ways, none resembling Abel's:

How do kids learn about death? Past generations saw it, lived with it. When I was a boy, coffins with corpses in them sat in the living room while we slept upstairs; we said goodbye to the shells of loved ones in the same room where we had lived with them as people. Now bodies are whisked away, either to occupy a sterile viewing salon away from home and life's context, or more and more often these days, disposed of in cremation.

Today's kids also watch killings without consequence, thousands of them, on television and in movies. And they get to play virtual executioner, courtesy of Nintendo and Sony. Lots of blood and guts but nothing real.

In both cases human life is rendered less "real" in death's absence.

How else do kids learn about death? Boys used to go hunting with their dads. They saw deer, rabbits, squirrels, shot them and gutted them. Girls helped their moms pack, cook, and serve the meat. They knew that pot roast used to have a face. Today rabbits are cute. Squirrels get fed. And deers named Bambi are orphaned when hunters (aka evil men) kill their moms. Guns are bad; they kill people. (And pencils are to blame for bad spelling.) Human life is debased by the elevation of subhuman life.

The fact is, we don't learn about death. Instead we avoid facing it at every turn, because facing death means facing the God we all know is there.

Today's Cain fortifies himself electronically. We invent expensive fantasies of self-justification, from Ayn Rand novels to Star Trek movies. Call it "virtual virtue." Neil Postman's book title, Amusing Ourselves to Death, exposes the vanity of this quest. But technology is merely an anesthetic, not a cure. Man still must face God after the last credits roll.

Today's Cain also fortifies himself with pseudo-science, which by my definition is any science incompatible with Scripture. He decides once again to make himself "like the Most High," so he invents Captain Planet cartoons and teaches preschooler Enoch his responsibility not merely to conserve but to "save our planet."

He also teaches sophomore Sally all about birth control and why abortion is her right. Why? Because a world filled to capacity is a world that must reckon with the end of history as we know it. In other words, man still must face God after the last spot is taken.

Tookie Williams has faced God, Who alone knows His final verdict on that life. And Tookie's name has become the badge of celebrities for whom death always requires a stand-in.

Today's takes on death, from Hollywood backlot to Hollywood High, are as varied as the clowns in a circus, and about as useless too, convenient distractions all. But the Grim Reaper continues marching on the lot of us, catching every one, no matter how fast we run. And there's only one way to beat him.

We've got to give up Cain's flight and follow Abel. In other words, turn and face death head on, so that by losing life we find it.

Cain tried to get the Garden back and could not. But Abel did.

Forgetting Dad, Remembering Father

I had breakfast with my buddy, Thomas, after prayer this morning. It's hard to beat the combination of good company and the 43rd St. Deli's Greek omelet. We spoke about Thomas' upcoming graduation from UF after twenty years in one sort of school or another, and his impending establishment of his own counseling practice in 2006. He's had years of professional training but hardly any experience, while I have had little training but thirty-seven years of experience. Thus the combination was bound to make for an interesting conversation.

Thomas specializes in dealing with children (and their families) who've suffered sexual abuse. We discussed -- but only lightly -- that subject briefly before turning to the topic of why such evils exist in the first place. Today's society is quick to assign mental illness as the cause of all heinous crimes. "Only a sick person would do such a thing," was the first, almost reflexive, retort of nearly everyone here in Florida to the news, earlier this year, that a rapist had buried his eight-year old victim alive in a trash bag just a few yards from where she had lived. But what other explanation is there?

How about "sin"? The natural state of unredeemed humanity explains evil better than anything else. It assigns blame, points the finger quite squarely. But acknowledging it in someone else necessitates reckoning with it in one's own life, so most folks prefer to deny the very concept of it. Illness, on the other hand, whether mental or otherwise, also acknowledges evil, but deflects blame. The problem with this explanation, as we noted in a post last week, is that saying "it's not your fault" also says "you can't help yourself." Admitting sin, however, makes repentance -- and therefore redemption -- possible.

We also talked about the need to "detach" after clients leave us, and the challenges it entails. I observed that it must be difficult, if not disheartening, for a professional counselor without faith in God to watch a needy client walk out the door. Detachment, to the unbeliever who has done all he can do, must be rather fatalistic. Thomas, on the other hand, can silently commit such persons into God's hands, knowing they are favored to have had him assigned to their case. He can also forget about them without guilt.

I remembered something valuable my Tulsa pastor, Richard Exley, told me when I was fraught with worry for my father, who after thirty years in ministry, was facing the crisis of his life. "Jim, you need to learn the difference between unconditional love and unconditional fellowship," he said, explaining that I was called to the former, but not the latter. "You think if you don't carry your dad's burden around with you all the time that you're not loving him, not being a good son. But you're just trying to do the Holy Spirit's job for Him."

Richard went on to explain why he was so good at pastoring other ministers. "When you walk out that door, I'm going to forget about you, about your problems. I'm not going to carry them around. That way I can be stronger for you when you need me. I can serve you better by leaving you in God's hands. You can do your dad a favor by praying and then forgetting about him. The Holy Spirit doesn't stop working when you stop worrying."

He was right, of course, and I started recovering from a nervous stomach right away. Oddly enough, Dad also started improving almost immediately, and within a few months he and Mom were reconciled. When he died ten months later it was a "good" death, the departure of a happy, fully restored man of God.

It's sad that sinners are wont to reject their Savior, because accepting Him would mean admitting the need for Him. Sinful man, whether resorting to humanistic psychotherapy, Hindu asceticism, or the rigors of any other religious system he designs to justify himself, will never be any good at being God. But it is tragic when, even after being saved by a Sovereign's grace, we Christians try to do His job for Him.

Here's a good motto, if not a mantra, for 2006: God is God and I'm not. Sinners would do well to admit it; we Christians would do well to remember it.

We Have Met the Enemy...

Much ado is being made these days about the "war on Christmas," a cultural conflict that has escalated dramatically over the past few years. On the one side are folks like Fox News' John Gibson, whose aptly titled book, The War on Christmas, claims that there's a liberal "plot" afoot to ban Christmas as a religious holiday altogether. On the other are liberal nincompoops like Joel Stein, whose condescending December 6 LATimes.com opinion piece (of what, I'd rather not say) avers that no such war exists, that living in a Christian nation is "like living with children," little idiots who "thought the world was going to end when the calendar went to three zeroes in a row."

I'm on Gibson's side, of course. He documents his case with times, dates, and place after place where someone has decided that Christians are not quite as equal as everybody else, and that any public celebration of our Savior is in poor taste. Stein and his ilk just hurl insult after Al-Franken-style insult, while ironically bragging on their tolerance and our lack of it.

Yet I think we had it coming. We, after all, are the ones who "secularized" Christmas in the first place, not so much by pretending there's a Santa or buying tickets to see Elf, but by letting Santa gradually, over decades, replace Jesus in public celebration without a countermand. In other words, over time we gave the secularists a seasonal inch and they took a cultural mile.

I have made this case before on other subjects, that the world mirrors the church in extreme. We allowed Dispensationalism to undercut the authority of the first 39 books of the Bible, so the world eagerly dispensed with the last 27 too.

We allowed the institution of marriage to deteriorate from the context of covenant to mere romance, from pledge to feeling, from solemn rite to sappy extravaganza. So the world is reinventing it altogether, from common-law cohabitation to same-sex nuptials, all of it based on the unassailable legitimacy of "feelings." You-Light-Up-My-Life theology that croons "it can't be wrong when it feels so right," as though it were Scripture.

We allowed Horace Mann and his cronies to sell us on the idea of "free" public education, which has turned out to be anything but free in the economic, moral, and political senses. Now we'd be happy if we could just get Jesus equal time with Darwin. But at least we have Sunday School!

Back to Christmas: George Grant, one of my favorites as a historian, writer, and just plain Christian, wrote a few days ago of Yuletide:

This wonderful holiday season--what we Moderns generically just call Christmastime--is historically a long sequence of holy days, festal revelries, and liturgical rites stretching from these waning moments of November until the first week or so of January. Collectively all these varied celebrations are known as "Yuletide." Beginning with Advent, a time of preparation and repentance, proceeding to Christmas, a time of celebration and generosity, and concluding with Epiphany, a time of remembrance and thanksgiving, Yuletide traditions enable us to see out the old year with faith and love while ushering in the new year with hope and joy. It is a season fraught with meaning and significance.

Unfortunately, it is also such a busy season that its meaning and significance can all too easily be obscured either by well-intended materialistic pursuits--frenzied shopping trips to the mall to find just the right Christmas gift--or by the less benign demands, desires, wants, and needs which are little more than grist for human greed. The traditions of Yuletide were intended to guard us against such things--and thus, are actually more relevant today than ever before.

By being so busy that we don't go to church on Christmas, we secularize it. By being so caught up in parties, network football, even big family dinners that we never get around to worshiping Him, we secularize Christmas. And we should not be surprised that our benign neglect has let loose the world's antipathy.

So the question remains: How do we take Christmas back? How do we win this war? The answer has only a little to do with fighting the ACLU's assaults, and rebutting literary hacks like Joel Stein. It's simple really: Take Christmas back in your own living room, on your own calendar, in your own network of family relationships, and at church. Put Santa and his elves out in the barn for once, and make sure there's room in your own inn for the King Who, two thousand years after His humble arrival, deserves a better room this time around.

Posting Delayed

"Life's what happens while you're making other plans," said John Lennon. My blogging has been delayed by travel. Hope to post within the next 24 hours.

The Best Defense is to Admit the Offense

Waiting in the Las Vegas Airport, hoping to get upgraded to First Class for the long flight home:

I stayed with long-time friends -- an attorney, his wife, and two daughters -- over the weekend here in Las Vegas. They're a delightful family, and their very presence takes some of the sin out of Sin City. They're also highly involved with world missions, their generosity proving that what happens in Vegas not only doesn't have to stay in Vegas, but can bless the very ends of the earth.

Talk around the breakfast bar last evening turned to the issue of heinous crimes, the insanity defense, and "expert witnesses" of the sort who are called in to evaluate and explain the mental states of defendants. Not surprisingly, the subject crops up again this morning in a USATODAY.com report that the Supreme Court has decided to hear an insanity defense case, a topic they historically have long refused to consider.

I was confronted with this subject for a third time in two days when, in reading Peggy Noonan's When Character Was King, I came to the chapter about John Hinckley, Jr.'s 1981 attempt to assassinate President Reagan. Hinckley was subsequently acquitted of attempted murder by reason of insanity, a verdict which caused a national furor and led several states to either modify or completely abolish the insanity defense.

One of the primary reasons this defense has been popular is that it explains the problem of evil without assigning blame, i.e., it denies sin as the explanation for evil. Ever since Adam blamed his wife for his own disobedience, Man has looked for ways to pass the buck for the evil in his heart. We simply do not want to admit our sin before God, even though such acceptance of responsibility is the first step on the pathway to redemption.

The simple fact is, sin explains the problem of evil, and admitting sin makes forgiveness, redemption, and healing possible. Tell a man he was born h*mos*xual and you take away his prospects for deliverance. Tell a teen killer he's innocent because his crime is otherwise unexplainable, and you sentence him to life without forgiveness. Then stick him in prison and, resigned to his own inability to change, he'll learn how to commit more crimes with professional aplomb.

The very existence of mental illness needs to be debated amongst Christians. The Bible makes no plain case for it, save the unsavory doctrine of demonic influences, which a good portion of the Church jettisoned long ago. (Is it surprising that when the Church throws out a portion of God's Word, the unrestrained world throws out the whole? Dispensationalists, especially with the publication of the Scofield Bible, undermined the authority of the Old Testament. Why should we be shocked that the world respects none of it?) This doesn't mean good theologians couldn't make a case that mental illness exists; I'm sure there would be good arguments pro and con. But the fact that the idea has been accepted without question, without a case being made that sinful man is truly evil and deserving of guilt, causes millions of people to live without any hope that they can change.

The Good News of Jesus does not only begin with "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life." It also must include an indictment delivered with hope. Peter preached in such a fashion on the Day of Pentecost, bringing not condemnation, but true conviction infused with hope. The Gospel, when it is preached effectively, is both a prosecution for the murder of Jesus and a simultaneous offer of clemency. And it is preached not by perfect people, but by previously condemned and pardoned perpetrators, something its listeners need to know from the start.

The Bible makes it clear that the only difference between any of us and the next John Hinckley, Jr., or Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, is God's restraining grace. Our society, indeed the world, would be a lot healthier if we would quit denying that fact, admit our depravity and utter powerlessness to "fix" ourselves, and began drinking the wine of forgiveness from God's fountain of grace.

Darwinism Takes A Dirt Nap

I originally posted this article back in April when there were only five or six regular readers of my blog. I have decided to republish it now, because my last few days have been consumed by a cold and a complete computer failure, which necessitated my formatting and reinstalling everything thereon. Hope you enjoy the rerun. New post on Tuesday!

Charles Darwin succeeded in foisting bad science upon the world only because bad science was preferable to the truth that God really is God and we have to stand accountable before him. Being a smart monkey is a better deal to sinful man than admitting he's sinful. Grow a tail, lose a spirit. Nice trade.

The outworking, or effluence actually, of Darwin's theories culminated in a modern vanity called communism, that state of perfection society achieves after socialism has done its magic. Vladimir Lenin promised, in fact, that within two generations he would produce a perfect state, a "worker's paradise," where the only government necessary would be a few administrative secretaries, and where the public urinals would be made of gold. Ah, yes, gold; but would they flush?

That's the big problem with collectivist praxis: Nothing works, or at least not for long. Why? Because being God is too big a job for anyone except, well, God. In fact, adding more bureaus to the bureaucracy only clogs the hopper even worse than it already is, because it just makes the beast churn out more of what he's already too full of. As one historian has noted, free men write books; bureaucrats fill out forms in triplicate and then shuffle papers all day.

One of my friends in the Soviet Union served two prison terms in the 1980s, both times for fictional crimes. I asked him later how the KGB found it so easy to take him. "We have a joke," he said, "that Soviet law is so marvelous that it contains something for everyone. You see, we have so many laws that I cannot keep one without breaking another. There are always grounds to get me for something."

Just as the printing of too many dollars makes money worth less (and eventually worthless), so writing too many laws only breeds lawlessness. Such irony was not lost on the average Russian in the mid 80s. That's why they referred to their land as a place of "unlimited impossibilities," and called Moscow, the capital of Absurdistan (it's the same word in both Russian and English).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the locals didn't know how to govern cooperatively. How could they? They had only known totalitarianism. Freedom, they assumed, must be the opposite, which is to say that the answer to bad government must be no government. Chaos reigned.

Moscow's bureaucrats, who never left office but simply declared themselves reformers, began making rules on their own. What once had been micromanagement from the Kremlin now became a regulatory peeing contest. One guy levied a ten percent tax on business, so his comrade down the hall levied an additional eleven percent burden on the same business. And so on.

Eventually Muscovite businesses were being taxed at more than one hundred percent of gross revenues, so nobody paid much of anything. And what's more, the pencil pushers upstairs didn't really expect them to. Everybody understood that if you want a little juice you've got to squeeze the whole lemon. If you want to collect twenty percent, go for a hundred-twenty. But such a philosophy assumes you won't run out of lemons.

What Russia had immediately after Gorbachev wasn't true freedom any more than a freshly beheaded chicken's flopping around the farm yard is dancing. It was simply the absurd death waltz of statism.

My question is: Why do so many lefties keep lining up for their turn with the dead chicken? Why do tenured American professors and congressional "progressives," none of whom have ever had to live with it, keep pressing for a way of governance that so recently failed so spectacularly?

Because so many people think they're better dancers, that's why.

Both socialism and communism would have been abandoned world-wide by now, were it not for one particularly evil conceit: "We can do it better." Time after time around the globe new pretenders connive or shoot their way to power in the name of doing it better, and then bring their various societies to ruin.

As PJ O'Rourke once commented (and this is a paraphrase because I'm in Latvia right now and can't look up the quote), "Saying the Soviet Union was a good system run by bad people is like saying hell is a nice place plagued by bad weather."

Thank God, when the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, Darwin's monkey got killed in the rubble. The Modern Era was done at last. Some might argue for an earlier or later date, but in front page terms, what better headline is there? Everything else, including the Soviet implosion, was aftershock. The quake that brought the house down happened that day in Berlin.

Of course the dawn of the Post-Modern era doesn't mean an end to chaos, just Darwinian induced chaos. Today's Post-Mods have mostly traded V.I. Lenin for John Lennon, but at least they're willing to sing a different song. They don't even know who they are yet (they're just Post-something else), but they are on a quest. Which makes for great opportunity if the Gospel is what it claims to be.

And I'm out to get them. It will be so much more fun without that danged monkey.