Tag Love

Earth Day: Nature is Not Our Mother

Todd R Leave a comment

In his classic book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton wrote: “Nature is not our mother; Nature is our sister.”[1]  Psalm 19 has an amazing contemplation of the relationships between, God, nature, and us.  Verses 1-6 show that the heavens, in their orderly patterns, “declare the glory of God,” in a language that anyone in any time and place can understand.  In verse 5, the sun “comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.”  In other words, nature obeys God’s will for it with eager expectation and joy, not reluctant obedience or dutiful drudgery, and God has endowed nature with all the strength needed for its tasks.

Then follows the Psalm’s middle section, verses 7-11, which declare that God has declared His will for human relationships as well, in His law:

“The law of the LORD is perfect,
            reviving the soul;
the testimony of the LORD is sure,
            making wise the simple;
the precepts of the LORD are right,
            rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is pure,
            enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the LORD is clean,
            enduring forever;
the rules of the LORD are true,
            and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
            even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
            and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
            in keeping them there is great reward.”[2]

Just as the heavens declare the glory of God by obeying His will with absolute regularity, His law shows His people how to declare His glory as well.  Verse 7 says “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul.”  As the sun metaphorically gets joy from its God-given task in verse 5, following God’s law is its own reward, to be desired even more than “much fine gold.”  As nature has all it needs for its tasks, God’s word has all we need for strength, wisdom, joy, enlightenment, and righteousness.  What an endowment of riches!

More on nature’s example for us comes later, in Matthew’s gospel, where Jesus uses the regularity of nature as an example of how people should love one another, and especially their enemies: “For [God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”  This verse suggests that Nature is better than man at self-sacrificing (agape) love and faithfulness to God’s will, but also provides an example of how to love, “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”[3]  As rain is for all; so love is for all.

Therefore, on this Earth Day, celebrate the earth God has endowed us with, but also remember: “Nature is not our mother; Nature is our sister.”  As God’s people are His sons, nature is also His beloved creation, perhaps His daughter.  Our constant, eternal, loving God cares about the needs of both.

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
            be acceptable in your sight,
O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”[4]

[1] Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy (1908).  P. 169.
[2] Psalm 19:7-11
[3] Matthew 5:45
[4] Psalm 19:14

Love When Bad Things Happen

Todd R 3 Comments

Fellow travelers,

Sometimes things happening in the world grab our attention and make us assign more significance to them than they deserve.  Sometimes these are natural phenomena, like earthquakes, comets, or eclipses, and sometimes they are manmade phenomena, like wars.

One reason we do this is that passages in the Bible like Mark 13:5-23 describe what events will happen before Jesus returns again.  We want Him to return!  While it’s right to anticipate with excitement that Jesus is coming back, it’s important to sort out such passages by what is describing what will happen (descriptive truth) and what God tells us to do when these things happen (prescriptive truth).  In all circumstances, the God’s primary commandments for us are to love God and to love our neighbor, even if they are our enemy.  No phenomena should pull us off that path, and Mark 13:5-23 recommends that.

In the table below, I paraphrase and categorize Mark’s message into what is descriptive vs. prescriptive truth:

DescriptivePrescriptive
Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’See that no one leads you astray
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, and nation will rise against nationDo not be alarmed
Earthquakes and famines in various locationsBe on your guard
You will be beaten in synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for my sakeBear witness before them and do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say
Brother will deliver brother over to death and you will be hated by allEndure
False christs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wondersBe on guard

To Jesus, none of the things in the descriptive column are new information.  All were included in His plan from eternity past.  The actions He recommends are not new information either.  The “Prescriptive” column tells us not to panic, but to endure, to keep doing what we should be doing before these bad things happened – Love God, love your neighbor, even if your neighbor is your enemy.

On the other hand, false christs and prophets will tell us current events are unprecedented and a fulfillment of prophecy and they will tell us what we should do.  The false prophet takes the descriptive of evil in the world and creates their own false prescriptive.  They recommend an incomplete and inaccurate narrative of current events as an ultimate solution.  Their own Babel which God must “come down” from heaven to even see (Genesis 11:5).  But the true Christ calmly says, “be on guard; I have told you all things beforehand”. (Mark 13:23). The true Christ comes down from heaven and demonstrates how to create a true ladder back to heaven, offering forgiveness to all, even those who refuse to accept it or practice love.  He will be thoroughly and eternally glorified by manifesting His kingdom as the only eternal kingdom, ruled by love, not by panic over current events.

No matter what we see happening in the news or in the world, Jesus knew it was coming and He told us that in any circumstance we should obey and glorify Him, through love for Him and neighbor.  He doesn’t panic and neither should we.

Amen.

Doctrine in Action

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Photo by Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash

In C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters, senior demon Screwtape writes fictional letters to Wormwood, a junior demon, on how to defeat his “patient.”  In one of these letters, Screwtape advises: “As long as [man] does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance… Wallow in it… Write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which [Heavenly Father] plants in a human soul… Do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm [the cause of evil] if [it is kept] out of his will… The more often he feels without acting, the less he will ever be able to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

Christianity is not a soul-less doctrine, but a restoration of the right relationships between souls and their Creator, which should lead to action.  Teaching should lead to love.  In 1 Timothy 1:3-4 Paul writes to Timothy: “As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.”  In his commentary on the verse, John Calvin says that Paul “judges of doctrine by the fruit; for every tiling that does not edify ought to be rejected, although it has no other fault; and everything that is of no avail but for raising contentions, ought to be doubly condemned.”

Calvin’s note and Screwtape’s fictional letter remind me of the linked Monty Python video of philosophers philosophizing about soccer while simultaneously “playing” soccer.

Every doctrine and institution of the church should empower His people to live for Him.  Are we playing the right game, and are we playing to win?

The Priorities of the Good Samaritan

Todd R Leave a comment

The parable of the Good Samaritan is well-known, even by those who aren’t Christian.  Briefly, it goes like this: a man is robbed, beaten, and left for dead on the side of a road.  First a priest, and then a Levite, passed him by, offering no help at all.  But a Samaritan, a member of a group despised by many Jews, stopped and helped the man, even bringing him to further help and paying the necessary expenses.

There is a lesson in the story about priorities – what this Good Samaritan put first, and what he didn’t.  But before covering his #1 priority, here are some things he did not prioritize, even though these aren’t necessarily bad things:

His first priority was not to fight for stricter laws against robbers.  What the robbers did was probably already illegal, and definitely not morally right.  We don’t know the fate of the robbers in the story, but they might have gotten away with this near murder.  In modern times, if criminals are getting away with bad behavior, a movement sometimes grows to make something that is already illegal “more illegal.”  If robbing is against the law, some might lobby to make the punishment harsher, or to focus laws on particular victims or perpetrators, but if they’re getting away with it now, how will these changes help?  The Good Samaritan couldn’t do much about this immediately, so it wasn’t his first priority.

His first priority also was not to raise public awareness of violence along the highways.  He didn’t create posters and social media hashtags (I write as if those things existed then).  Such a campaign can have benefits.  It could help people be more careful when traveling, it might encourage the government to allocate more of its limited resources toward highway safety, but it will never completely solve the problem. The Good Samaritan couldn’t do much about this immediately, so it wasn’t his first priority either.

Photo by youssef naddam on Unsplash

So, what was the Good Samaritan’s priority?  He focused on what he could control, and any other concerns came later.  He focused on the problem right in front of him – a man beat up and near death on the side of the road.  Sometimes we can focus so much on advocating, that we lose sight of doing.  (I worry about that for myself as someone who spends so much time blogging.)  But the Good Samaritan “proved to be a neighbor”[1] by taking care of the neighbor right in front of him.

We can also be deluded into thinking that our government and other institutions should be able to solve all of our problems if only we fight hard enough for it.  However, they never will be enough, because any and all institutions are made up of people who too often deny their own responsibility for the problems of the world. Especially on social media, we often get the illusion that we can offload our responsibility for the world to others, and that what’s happening somewhere else is more important than what’s right in front of us.

While advocacy can be a good and necessary thing, God wants us to prioritize doing, which is what everyone in heaven will do!  In heaven, everyone will be like the Good Samaritan (and like Jesus), and therefore we won’t need better laws, awareness campaigns powered by advertising and hashtags, or stricter enforcement of laws.  The bloody victim by the roadside won’t exist.  And that is something to look forward to!

In the meantime:
“I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.” – C.S. Lewis

[1] Luke 10:36

Of Love and Forgiveness

Todd R 1 Comment

Fellow travelers,

Have you known Christians who love well?  Not ones who know the Bible well, or who know all the right doctrines, or who are involved in many church activities.  Not even a person who writes (or reads) a great blog.  These are not bad things, and they may help someone become more loving, but they aren’t the same thing as being a person who loves as Christ loved.  Who loves well.

Not everyone like this gets there the same way, but Jesus mentioned at least one specific way: the more we know how great God’s forgiveness for us is, the greater is our love.

This comes from Luke chapter 7, in the story about “a woman of the city, who was a sinner.”  This woman broke an expensive flask of ointment over Jesus’s feet, then wiped the ointment on His feet with her hair and tears.  What a bold statement of devotion to Jesus she made!

However, Jesus was criticized by a Pharisee for not refusing this act of worship: “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.”[1]  To the Pharisee, an upright, respectable religious person should have nothing to do with this sinful woman.

In response, Jesus tells a parable about a man who was forgiven a very large debt, and therefore loved the one who forgave him more than another man did who was forgiven a smaller debt.  Jesus contrasts the actions of the Pharisee – who didn’t treat Jesus with nearly as much honor as the “sinner” – with the woman, and says: “Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”

We don’t know much for sure about this woman’s sins, but we know the Pharisee was aware of them and hated her for it.  He thought her sins were worse than others and should exclude her from any social interactions.  We also know that she was aware of how great her sin was, but she also knew that Jesus loved and forgave her anyway, even though her sin was great.  Jesus tells us her devotion is proof of that.

In this story, those with “checkered” pasts, full of sin, pain, and suffering, can become the most passionate believers, as they know what the gospel is capable of overcoming first-hand, in themselves and in others.  Jesus and his early followers went to these outcast people, and the faith of that first generation of Christians changed the world forever!

So, who is willing and able to reach out to sinners in the same way God reached out to them in Christ?  Those who have a very real sense of how great are the sins God that has forgiven them. Often the greatest “sinners” are the ones who learn how to love well.

[1] Luke 7:37-39