Fear and Trembling

“(Thirty) years now, Where’d they go. (Thirty) years … I don’t know. I sit and I wonder sometimes, where they’ve gone.” -           With apologies to Bob Seger’s song “Like a Rock” I write this the night I attended my thirty-year class reunion.  It was good to see so many of my friends; to hear of their joys and pains; and to know they care about me after so long. Many spoke of the good things that have transpired after thirty years: marriages that have lasted, educations that have paid off, businesses bought and sold, the pride of military service, the honor in completing ‘a good day’s work’ for year after year, and the overwhelming joys of children and grand-children.  But, O, the bad things: the aches and pains of growing older, divorce, the rigors of military service for ourselves and our children;  friends, parents, and family separated by death; cancer and illness, car wrecks, and the overwhelming sorrow ...

(This is an article written for our local paper.) A Christian view of death and dying sounds very strange to the modern ear.  This is especially true because Christianity has long seen death as true and right in one sense and evil and wrong in another.  It is seen as not a part of God’s perfect will, but it is seen as a part of his decretive will. God’s perfect will, or will of desire, is expressed in His commandments as contained in the Bible.  It does not contain sin or the consequences of sin.  God’s perfect will is what He would have, not what He would allow. God’s decretive will contains those things which He does not desire in and of themselves, but those things which He allows.  This will includes all things that actually happen (Ephesians 1: 11).  God allows death in this sense, and He allows death for good reasons. In Christianity, seen from God’s perfect will, death is an enemy to be destroyed, not an event to be accepted. Christ ha...

(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...

(This is an article written for our local paper.) 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 am not about to try to give a comprehensive explanation for how evil came to be. God created men with the ability to sin and the ability not to sin, but I cannot reason beyond that. I do not know the “how”; I just know the “is.” I know that evil exists. I know evil is present. I know evil is real. What must exist in order for evil to be truly wrong? Does not the existence of evil itself  require a standard of good? Should I just accept evil as a part of the way the universe works? Should I accept a view of evil based on social convention, or the DNA encoded in my cells? These things vary from one person to the next, or one time to the next, but we do not find a definition of evil that changes grea...

Every person who is responsible to pick songs for corporate worship should read the essay that Justin Taylor quotes at his blog . I reprint Taylor’s quote below. From Carl Trueman, “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” in The Wages of Spin (pp. 159-160): Perhaps . . . [the Western church] has drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries and regards them as little short of embarrassing. A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party—a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is—or at least should be—all about health, wealth, and happiness corrupted the content of our worship? . . . In the psalms, God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest ...

A hymn for those who know what pain is: A Hymn That Would Not Be Written Today - Reformation21 Blog

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 ...

There is something profoundly wrong with death. I am not talking in abstract terms here; I am talking about the death of my Mother last year. My Mom was the one who I could always count on to be there for me, even when I had done wrong. She was the one who dried my tears from my eyes with a dishtowel when I cried. She was the one who brought joy to my life as a child. I was very ill when I was a kid. I had a severe case of histoplasmosis of the lungs at age one. This was not as treatable a condition then as it is now. My parents were told at one point that I had only a few months to live. I was fourteen before I really grew out of it. Mom was the one who held me in her arms when I could not get my breath and rocked me back and forth to help me breath. She made my early life special. She took me to see what corn was, how it grew on the stalk, and how it had hair that grew on the end. She showed me many things. She channeled my intelligence into productive things and always seemed to ha...