The Week in Words

Wayne Grudem on the practical application of the doctrine of providence:

“David was able to sleep in the midst of his enemies because he knew that God’s providential control made him ‘dwell in safety,’ and he could say, ‘In peace I will both lie down and sleep’…..Because of our confidence in God’s providential care, we need not fear any evil or harm, even if it does come to us–it can only come by God’s will and ultimately for our good.”
~Wayne Grudem Systematic Theology

As my Sunday School children learned a couple of weeks ago, God’s sovereignty is scary to the unbeliever and comforting to the believer. The unbeliever knows that God’s sovereignty means judgment for sin and sinners, and understandably resists this doctrine. The believer knows that God’s sovereignty means good for him, because God has declared his plans in his word: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom 8:29 ESV, emphasis mine). Because of this, the believer rightly embraces the doctrine of God’s providence.

The Christian can take confidence, even when faced with lions in an arena, that God has wonderful plans for his life.

After all, as my Sunday School students learned this week from Ezekiel, God specializes in making dead bones live.

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Don’t forget to take a look at Barbara H’s meme “The Week in Words”, where bloggers collect quotes they’ve read throughout the week.

Every four years or so, I hear the old refrain begin again.

The media encourages politicians to “reach across the aisle”, to reconcile between the parties, to limit their squabbling and be a happy family.

And every four years (actually much more frequently), I groan as politicians pander to one another and to Washington business as usual, further enslaving the American people.

This is what comes to mind when I read Thomas Paine’s revolutionary words in his Common Sense.

“…I am inclined to believe that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation may be included within the following descriptions: Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent than all the other three.”

There are four types of people who encourage the continued farce of American politicking:

1. Those who have something to gain from business-as-usual
   The career politician who makes a living by not making waves. The lobbyist who makes a living toadying before said politicians. The bureaucrat and the bail-out who make a living off the backs of working Americans.
2. Those who cannot see the direction we are pointed
   The unconcerned who think little of the slavery into which they are selling their children, so wrapped up they are in their current troubles. The misled who somehow believe that government intervention in the economy is helping rather than hurting.
3. Those whose prejudices lead them to ignore business-as-usual
   The social zealots who are so eager to see their agenda accomplished that they willfully refuse to see how the accomplishment of their agenda means the destruction of American freedom. Those who adamantly follow a party, insisting that if their party does it it must be right.
4. Those who embrace moderation, who think politicking can be reasoned with

I, like Paine, am most afraid of the fourth group.

These, who think they can make the Republican party, the Democratic party come to their senses. These, who think that our republic could be saved if we just all got along. These, who think that small measures can somehow stem the tide, that outreach to the other side would end in agreement.

These are the frightening ones.

These good-hearted souls mean well but underestimate the weight our nation currently stands against.

Our government is bankrupt, amassing debt at a rate of more than $1 million per minute (see the US Debt Clock). The burden of the national debt amounts to a home mortgage for every taxpayer–and continues to grow as the number of taxpayers declines (Welcome to retirement, Baby Boomers!)

Government encroaches upon more and more of our lives–from big business bail-outs to increasing government regulation of every part of our business and leisure to ill-conceived public welfare programs.

Within a generation (or less), American freedom may be little more than a footnote in history–a brief age in line with Greek democracy. Freedom in America, and perhaps around the world, will have died in slavery while moderates beg for small solutions.

We are selling ourselves into slavery (…the borrower is the slave of the lender.” Prov 22:7)

Now is no time for moderation, I say. Now is a time for drastic measures.

We must halt our spending. We must cut our spending. We cannot merely make motions towards fiscal responsibility, we must cut our losses and RUN toward fiscal responsibility.

No compromise budget will do for me. Give me something radical–something like the Tea Party Budget.

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Don’t forget to take a look at Barbara H’s meme “The Week in Words”, where bloggers collect quotes they’ve read throughout the week.

I’m taking a systematic theology class at my church, and we have a fair bit of reading each week. Like most of my (non-internet) reading, my systematic theology reading is generally done on the lam, in snatches here and there between activities or in the bath.

This habit of squeezing reading into every available moment does wonders for getting me through vast quantities of material in relatively short amounts of time–but it means that I rarely have opportunity to annotate like I would prefer to do.

But chapter 15 of Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology forces me to annotate, even if it means dripping water on the pages or getting through less material per session due to digging around in my purse for a pen.

Chapter 15 is about creation–a topic I have decided interest in (and opinions about.)

Chapter 15 includes items like this:

Derek Kidner notes that Scripture stands “against every tendency to empty human history of meaning…in presenting the tremendous acts of creation as a mere curtain-raiser to the drama that slowly unfolds through the length of the Bible. The prologue is over in a page; there are a thousand to follow.”

By contrast, Kidner notes that the modern scientific account of the universe, true though it may be, “overwhelms us with statistics that reduce our apparent significance to a vanishing-point. Not the prologue, but the human story itself, is now the single page in a thousand, and the whole terrestrial volume is lost among uncatalogued millions.”

Scripture gives us the perspective on human significance that God intends us to have.

I appreciate Grudem’s (and Kidner’s) recognition of the emphasis God places on humanity in the creation of the world–but I respectfully submit that neither Grudem nor Kidner have adequate understanding of what creation says about the role of humanity.

Far from intimating that humanity is small and insignificant in light of the enormity of the cosmos, modern day physics and cosmology suggests exactly the opposite. The “anthropic principle”, first presented by Brandon Carter in 1973 and since attested to by abundant research, posits that the universe exists in precisely the way it would have to exist for humanity to exist.

As Patrick Glynn puts it in God: The Evidence (which I am currently reading):

“…the anthropic principle says that all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common–these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life.

In essence, the anthropic principle came down to the observation that all the myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the beginning of the universe for the creation of man–that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings.”

Contrary to Kidner’s intimation of what modern science says about humanity in light of the universe, the anthropic principle says that the vastness of the universe (from the speed of the universe’s expansion to the constant governing gravity to the exact temperature of stars) exists so that humanity might exist.

Physics and astronomy, for all its looking at the inanimate universe, says an awful lot about the importance of humanity.

A quote from There is a God by Antony Flew (once the world’s most famous atheist, who became a theist prior to his death) further illustrates this point (I paraphrase the first bit, which takes over a page in the book, before quoting directly in the indented section below):

“Imagine entering a hotel room on your next vacation. The CD player is playing a track from your favorite recording. The print over the bed is identical to the one over the fireplace in your home. The room is scented with your favorite fragrance. The minibar is stocked with your favorite beverages and snacks. The book on the desk is the next volume by your favorite author. All the grooming products in the bathroom are the brands you prefer. The TV is tuned to your favorite station.

“…You would certainly be inclined to believe that someone knew you were coming.

That vacation scenario is a clumsy, limited parallel to the so-called fine-tuning argument…. “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture,” write physicist Freeman Dyson, “The more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming.”…

Let’s take the most basic laws of physics. It has been calculated that if the value of even one of the fundamental constants–the speed of light or the mass of an electron, for instance–had been to the slightest degree different, then no planet capable…of human life could have formed.”

In other words, the one who created the universe’s laws created them with humanity in mind.

Absolutely incredible.

I suggest a different hypothesis for why God had creation take one page of Scripture while the rest of the pages are occupied by the human story.

Perhaps God saw no need to repeat himself multiple times. Why would he need to explicate every aspect of the creation when he has designed the universe such that we can observe his acts of creation and see in them his activity?

While I greatly respect Grudem, I feel that he, like many others, has fallen into the error of thinking that the Bible and the physical universe are at odds with one another, when they are in fact in perfect agreement (since the God who cannot lie was the author of both).

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Don’t forget to take a look at Barbara H’s meme “The Week in Words”, where bloggers collect quotes they’ve read throughout the week.

What makes a boy into a man?

Is it the growth of facial hair, the deepening of the voice, the sudden sprout of long limbs?

Is it finally learning to shave without (too many) strips of toilet paper on one’s face, learning to speak without squeaking, learning to walk comfortably with those new long limbs?

Or is it something else entirely, something not physiological, something beyond development?

Jo (of Three Star Night) quotes a Glamour article that posits that the difference between boys and men is that men have steady jobs, own houses, and generally settle down.

Jo disagrees somewhat:

“Boys want a great number of things. Men will sacrifice to achieve those goals. He will make sacrifices to hold down a job, to pay the rent, to commit to a church, and commit to a woman. Ironically enough, the thought of making that sacrifice should shake a man’s confidence. But the man of God isn’t confident in his own strength, he is confident in the strength that God gives. God’s strength is made perfect in weakness for us all.”

Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference not just between boys and men but more generally between kids and adults.

Likely it’s just growing pains, but I’m not sure whether I like this whole “adult” gig.

Getting up morning after morning and going to work. Sticking something out even after it becomes mundane (as opposed to my previous academic lifestyle where I switched things up every semester–with new classes, new students, new subject matter.) Not getting a break every 8 weeks or so.

I still feel like I’m fumbling to find my way in this grown-up world.

I want grown-up life to be easy–but isn’t that just another example of my immaturity? Don’t grown-ups recognize that life isn’t easy and deal with it? Instead, I find myself imagining a hundred scenarios that might allow me to escape the grown-up drudgery of office, home, sleep, rinse and repeat.

I have plenty of wants–I want a clean home, time to craft, a husband beside me, and a house full of children. I want to quit my job (not because I dislike what I do, but because I dislike having to do it daily). I want to own a house. I want to grow a garden. I want to have more time to read, to ride my bicycle, to take pictures. I want, I want, I want.

Like a child in a toy store, I’m full of wants, sometimes even demands.

So often, still, I speak like a child, I reason like a child, I act like a child.

But I don’t want to remain a child. I want to be a grown-up–if I only knew what a grown-up was.

I certainly hope being grown-up doesn’t mean mere resignation to monotony or having work define one’s life.

But I think I’m beginning to see that being a grown-up does have an aspect of contented obedience. It’s faithfully being a steward of the time I’ve been given; a faithful steward of the job, the relationships, the home, the stuff I’ve been given. It’s faithfully leading the young hearts that have been entrusted to my care in Sunday School. It’s faithfully going to work and doing my best.

Being a grown-up doesn’t mean resignation–it means willful, obedient contentment.

Lord, would you help me mature into that kind of grown-up girl.

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Don’t forget to take a look at Barbara H’s meme “The Week in Words”, where bloggers collect quotes they’ve read throughout the week.

“God helps those who cannot help themselves.”
~Charles H. Spurgeon (from my pastor’s Twitter feed)

“So Gideon gathered together an army to fight against Midian. At last, he had gathered together thirty-two thousand men. Surely that was enough to defeat Midian.”

I asked my Sunday School class if they thought 32,000 men was a big enough army.

They nodded, said that it seemed pretty big to them.

“Well, you know what God thought? God thought Gideon’s army was too big.”

I could see the puzzlement on their faces. Too big? Seriously?

“Yeah. God said that if they had that many men, they’d get proud and think they were the ones who had defeated Midian, instead of realizing that God had defeated Midian.”

One of the kids raised his hand and interjected a bit of what he’d learned last week from the book of Joshua. “But the important part wasn’t how many men they had or how good their plan was. It’s only whether God’s on their side.”

“You’re right. We learned how God defeated Jericho when the people were obedient to God’s battle plan–and we learned about how the people lost at Ai because Achan had been disobedient, even though they thought they could easily win. The important thing was that God was on their side–not what their battle strategy was.

And now, when Gideon was getting ready to fight Midian, God wanted to make sure that everyone knew that the reason they’d win was because HE was on their side. He didn’t want anyone else to think that they’d been responsible for the victory.”

I told how God whittled Gideon’s army down to 300 men, how He sent terror of them to the Midianite camp in front of them, how He ultimately won them the victory.

I’ve been struck this week with the tender mercy of God. When we think we can help ourselves, when we think that someone other than God can help us, God mercifully pares down our army, such that we realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was He (and He alone) who effects our salvation.

In my Sunday School “flock” meeting last night, we read in Hosea, and I was reminded again of God’s severity and His mercy when He says:

“For I will be like a lion to Ephraim,
and like a young lion to the house of Judah
I, even I, will tear and go away;
I will carry off, and no one shall rescue.
I will return again to my place
until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face,
and in their distress earnestly seek me.”
~Hosea 5:14-15

Unwilling to let Israel go on pridefully playing the whore, God comes at them like a lion, tearing them to pieces until they recognize that only God can heal their wounds.

My church’s songwriters (Highland Park Writers’ Collective) wrote a beautiful piece that describes this well.

“Because He is so faithful,
He will always tear apart
Every gleaming idol
Built inside the human heart”
~Tearing Down by Christensen, McCann, Qualsett

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Don’t forget to take a look at Barbara H’s meme “The Week in Words”, where bloggers collect quotes they’ve read throughout the week.

Every so often, something that has been brewing on the periphery pushes itself into center stage, or at least back into my attention.

Like when I just recently read an article about Joel Osteen’s equivocation regarding homosexuality and then saw the following “defense” of Osteen from Ordinary Pastor:

“At the same time, I have to call a timeout. CNN featured a story on the smiling mega-church pastor today and indicated that Osteen is being criticized by many for preaching ‘a gospel-lite.’

This is just unfair and uncalled for. There is enough fodder from the preaching file of Joel Osteen to confirm that this is simply not true.

Osteen does not preach a gospel-lite because he doesn’t preach anything near the gospel.”

~From Ordinary Pastor

That was my conclusion after reading Osteen’s Become a Better You. I wrote:

“I see no evidence that Osteen has maintained any modicum of the true gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Thinking of Osteen’s teachings (as I understand them from my reading of Become a Better You), I am struck by the relative unimportance of the controversies that often fly through my New Calvinist blogroll.

When the gospel is at stake, is it worthwhile for us to be arguing about whether John Piper ought to have invited Rick Warren to a Desiring God conference?

Reflecting on Osteen drives me in two directions that might seem to be opposite one another. First, it makes me believe in the absolute necessity of upholding the cross of Christ as the only means by which man can be saved. Yet it also makes me more tentative towards announcing differences in other doctrines to be heretical.

It makes me more willing to expose those who proclaim what is clearly false–and much less willing to oust from the faith those who disagree with my interpretation of Scripture on secondary issues.

It makes me feel that it is no time to be culling tares when there are wolves among the sheep.

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Don’t forget to take a look at Barbara H’s meme “The Week in Words”, where bloggers collect quotes they’ve read throughout the week.