Fear and Trembling

(This is an article written for our local paper.) Our last article explored certain philosophical problems with the existence of evil.  I wanted to explore the personal side of evil’s presence it in this article. Knowing that evil “is,” that it exists, is enough to convince me that there is a God. We cannot define evil without defining good. Evil is in some way good’s opposite, a falling short of the good. Knowing that evil “is” leads us relentlessly to a God who is the definition of the good. Without Him, we would not know evil when we see it. Of course, Christianity does not stop there. It also offers hope for deliverance from evil. In the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ we find ultimate deliverance from “the last enemy,” death (1 Corinthians 15:25-28). In Christ, we find deliverance from the power of evil and the forces that bring it about (Colossians 2:8-15). In my own life, many things have not worked out the way I had hoped. I have been quite disa...

Much has been written about the philosophical problems the existence of evil poses for the Christian faith. The philosophical question is simple: how can God be both all-powerful and all-good while allowing evil and suffering? I have attempted an answer to this intellectual question here , but I wanted to explore the personal side of it in this post. In my own life, many things have not worked out the way I had hoped. I have been quite disappointed. I’ve had childhood illness, watched my grandmother die of colon cancer when I was about 13, been through a painful broken engagement, been through a divorce, remarried only to struggle with infertility for several years, endured a devastating car wreck that has injured me permanently, watched my mother die a long and painful death at the hands of congestive heart failure, and wrestled with personal illness in adulthood. Above all, I have faced my own sins and failures with the pain that comes from regret and remorse. But my suffering ...

Matt Chandler over at the Resurgence has an interesting post here . He uses the Ned Flanders character from the Simpson’s show as an embodiment of the things he is troubled by in evangelicalism / fundamentalism. As a guy that was raised in a fundamentalist church, I identified with much of he post. Here’s an excerpt: …For years before I began to pastor a church I knew just what the problem was in American evangelical culture, and it wasn't sin, it was church people, it was Ned and his friends. The "frozen chosen" I think I have heard them called. They were old, tired, non missional, unmoved by the gospel, and thought the Left Behind movies were a great idea. They had driven our precious Lord's bride into the ground and deserved at least to be mocked in our young, hip, missional conversations and sermons and maybe even killed in some sort of Old Testament fashion… It's a strange thing to wake up and find out you are the very thing you hated and rebelled against t...