The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

And this is scripture and it is true, but what does it mean about God? I have heard people say that this verse means that God has no control over who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell. If it was up to God, no one would go to Hell, they say and then are left scratching their heads at the idea of omnipotence.

Becoming a parent has helped clear these thoughts up for me. My son is almost 2½ and while he is a sweet child, he is also a son of Adam and born into sin. Because of this, there are times where I see him being tempted and while it is perfectly within my power to remove him from the temptation or the temptation from him, more often than not, and for a multitude of reasons, it pleases me to watch him struggle, it pleases me to watch him fall, and then it pleases me to spank him. And it pleases me, because by faith, I believe that God is using this process in both my and my son’s life. But at that very same time that I am so pleased, it also displeases me that Gavin has struggled and that he has failed. But consider this: there is no contradiction in my pleasure and my displeasure. Instead they sit very neatly side by side and the one complements the other. And I am just a man. How much more complex must an infinite God be?

We cheat ourselves and God of something when we think of Him so simply. To me, it is no contradiction to say that God has ordained all things for his purposes, to say that He is not willing that any should perish and then to affirm Romans 9:20-23:

Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,

What say you?

What would you do?

Think about it for a moment, and throw away your little answers, like “I’d bring about world peace”, or “I would end world hunger and eradicate disease”. That’s kid’s stuff. You’re God, remember, so what would you do? And don’t go and copy your predecessor either. You have to think of something completely original. In fact, throw out all the concepts that you have now and come up with all new ones. You’re God, and there is no idea of war unless you say so, nor is there the notion of peace, but that you make it to be so.

What would you do?

Seriously, think about it for a second.

If you’re like me, you’ll hit a wall very quickly. I have no idea, was my honest answer to this question. I lack the necessary traction to even process the question. Everything I know, every concept, every idea or ability to process an idea is framed by the One True God, Jehovah. I can only imagine within the framework that He has created. And that is exactly as it should be.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. (Hebrews 11:3)

As always, feedback is appreciated.

“So this day shall be to you a memorial; and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD throughout your generations. You shall keep it as a feast by an everlasting ordinance” (v. 14).

“So you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this same day I will have brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations as an everlasting ordinance” (v. 17).

“And it shall be, when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice of the LORD, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households” (vv. 26-27a).

Notice how God has chosen to act towards His people. Be astonished, even. The Passing Over, the event that Passover commemorates, does not occur until after these instructions (vv. 29-32). What kind of God is this? He establishes a memorial before He has yet done the thing memorialized.

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In the same way, also, Christ, on the night He was to be betrayed, took the bread and the cup, and established a new memorial that signified His death before He died. Christ memorializes the End of all sacrifices before He became the end. The Lord’s Supper: The New Passover.

We worship a God who establishes memorials before He brings all things to pass. Have faith, then.

Let me try to explain how it happened to me. You see, I always used to think of a trial in the courtroom sense, and while that works on a certain level, I would let the other aspects of a courtroom drama invade the way I thought about the word. The essence of a trial is that something is tried against a standard, in the same way something that looks like gold is tried to determine if it is, in fact, actual gold, or in the case of a courtroom, the way a defendant is tried against the law to determine how they stand in relationship to it.

To my mind, temptation functions much the same way. When we are tempted by our desire for something, we are tested against the law based on whether we attempt to achieve our desire in accordance with the law.

As an example, let’s take a look at the three clearly documented temptations of Christ: He was tempted to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger, he was tempted to take his rightful place as ruler of the world, and he was tempted to use his position as the Son of God to bring glory to himself. (If these descriptions sound odd to you, go back and re-read the text.)

With the stones to bread, I think there is little controversy. Christ was hungry from his fasting, but his time of fasting was not yet complete and/or it was not His Father’s will that he do miracles yet.

When Satan offered him the kingdoms of the world, Christ’s temptation was not to worship Satan, but rather the thing that he rightfully desired was to take his place as King of King and Lord of Lords. Worshipping Satan was the unlawful means that he was offered to bring it about.

When he was taken up onto the pinnacle of the temple, he was tempted to extricate himself from a physical location in a way that would bring glory to himself (think angles streaming down from heaven to catch him). The unlawful means that Satan offers Christ was to tempt (test – same Greek root word) God by putting God in a position where He would have to act to save Christ.

One last note that I’ll make in this post is that the things that Christ was tempted by were not evil, but were good things (feeding his hungry body, taking his rightful place as the King of the earth, and bringing himself glory.) It was only the unlawful means that Satan offered that would have been sin. For me, this ties right into Galatians 4:4

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law

What do you think?

Are you still reading this? Sheesh…

There’s no coffee bar there, no fancy tilted shelving displaying the stock, no subdued, recessed lighting. You go there to buy, sell, trade and talk about books. But not in a pretentious or refined way. Books are the commodity there, just as with any bookstore, but nothing there detracts from the books. You don’t go there for Atmosphere. You go there for books. Period. It possesses all the analogous refinement of a livestock-auction arena; it’s a meat-market for book-lovers. Everyone in there is on the bibliophilic make. You hope to get lucky and pick up a few to take home. Everybody knows why you’re there, so you don’t have to pretend. Drool. Fondle. Grab an armload of books–the implicit promise of a trip home–until something better presents itself around the corner… Take one over to the comfortable (if well-used) couches for, um, closer examination. Hope for jouissance.

Besides the thought that if I’m ever in Wichita, I want need to visit this Bookaholic place, here’s what popped into my head as I read this: when was the last time you heard someone praising a church for similar reasons?

There’s no coffee bar there, no “come early and have a doughnut” sign on the front lawn, no grandiose choir, no special classes for 3 year olds, 5 year olds, junior high teens, senior high teens, college kids, career-minded girls, single moms, single people, desperate housewives, mid-life crisesing men or golden agers. You go there to think, talk, hear, and learn about God. You go there to worship. But not in a pretentious or refined way. God is the focus there, just as with any church, but nothing there detracts from Him. You don’t go there for Atmosphere. You go there for God. Period. It transcends analogous comparison; it is the only thing like it. Everyone in there is there for worship. Everybody knows why you’re there, so you don’t have to pretend. Listen. Sing. Ask. Fellowship. Sit in your pew or chair and meditate upon the greatness of God and His Son Jesus Christ. Pray for conformity to Him.

What do you say?

I’ll post more later, but if anyone has any thoughts I’ll be checking back in before I preach tomorrow night, so you have a prime opportunity to influence what is preached from a pulpit.

Any takers?

My understanding of Prevenient Grace is that it is what gives all men the ability to exercise their free will to choose or reject God. Here is my primary question: If God has given all men the power to choose him, then what is it that makes one man choose God and another reject Him? Is it their upbringing? Their environment that shaped them? And what role does Wesleyan Theology ascribe to God in making those choices? What I am getting at is this: if God makes the man and determines all the little things about him, and if God chooses the man’s parents and so on and so forth, then how is Wesley’s concept of free will any different than Calvin’s? What am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

I’ve titled this post analogous grace, because I want to deal with how God uses things He has created to reveal aspects of himself and how he works through these roles in the world around us. To give an example of what I mean, think about the following words/titles/roles: Father, Wife, Husband, Lord, Church, Shepherd, Bride, Son, King, Priest, etc. Each of these words are well known to us and have strong and definite meanings. Each of these words are also used by God to describe either Himself or something that He relates to in an important way.

As before, in this post, my goal is not to convince you of a Sovereign God, but to bring together separate ideas. If you believe in a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, outside of time, and who sustains the world, and this God refers to Himself as our Father and us His Sons and then institutes a human role of father and son, then it is hard to avoid the idea that the role of a Father is representative of certain aspects of God.

Let me take this idea one step further and say this as well, a father is different from a king,which is different from a church elder, which is different from a father, and so on. What I mean to say by this, is that while each of these roles may have some overlap between them in what they do, they are each different from one another specifically because they represent different aspects of God. This also means that what is good for a father to do, may not necessarily be good for a government to do, may not necessarily be good for a church to do, may not necessarily be good for a son to do, and so on. Because God has invested some aspect of Himself in each of these roles, it is reasonable to believe that He would tend to bless when someone in one of these roles is acting in a way that represents Him correctly.

This is why churches must be very careful to not supplant the role of family and or government, why government must be careful to not supplant the role of church or family, and why family must not supplant church or government. It is why a husband must not become the wife, and why the wife must not become a husband, why bride and bridegroom are important distinctions, and so on. Each of these specific things bears witness to God and the relationships that He has established to teach us more of him. And because grace is tied up in the specific work that God is accomplishing, we should not be surprised that he would bless certain actions if performed by a father and curse them if performed by a church. And that is the heart of what I mean by analogous grace, that God has drawn analogies for us to better know Him, and we had best be mindful of them.

What do you say? Is this off the mark or does it have the ring of truth? Let me know.

God’s
Riches
At
Christ’s
Expense

(This one is the best because it both defines and spells Grace at the same time!!!)

And while I don’t really want to knock those definitions (except maybe the acrostic), I wonder if you’ve ever felt like me that such simplistic definitions do not do grace justice?

I should point out that I’m not saying that we can completely understand grace. In fact, as we discuss grace a little bit, I’d like to try to show that to understand grace completely, we would have to understand God completely.

The seed thought that I have for thinking about grace is this:

Grace is associated with the specific work that God is performing in any situation. What we identify as grace is the interaction of God with us as His creation to accomplish His purposes. Grace is tied up in the specific actions of God and in our perception of those actions (think revelation).

In this post, I want to focus on the specificity of grace in any given situation.
As I was growing up, I tended to think of the world as a complex system that God had put into place and that ran, machine-like with only occasional “intervention” needed by Him. And while this abstraction of the world serves quite well for some purposes, much like Newtonian physics, it is a severely flawed way of understanding both God and the world He has created. You see, Scripture defines God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and outside of time. It also says that he actively sustains the world. Because of this, any system that God has created is, by His very nature, constanly being intervened upon. Or to say it another way, God Himself IS the system (and therefore, is not a system at all.)

If we accept this, that a Sovereign God as described in Scripture demands a completely involved God, and that God’s involvement in our lives is of a personal nature, we begin to see how specific grace must be.

I should also state this: If you do not believe in a sovereign God, then it is not my intent with this post to convince you of it. The goal of this post is to bring previously separate concepts about God and His grace together into something of a cohesive whole (and, as with all my posts, to perpetrate excessive comma usage upon the world)

Let me give some examples that demonstrate my understanding of grace in action:

Example 1:
Let’s suppose for the purposes of this example that God’s ideal for a functioning home is some form of home school. This is for example purposes only. Let’s also say we have FamilyA and FamilyB. The Mom and Dad of FamilyA have been saved for about 6 years and are in a small Bible preaching church in a small town with no Christian schools. Several church members teach at the local public school and DaughterA and SonA both attend there. FamilyB attend a different church in the same town and the Mom and Dad of FamilyB have been saved for approximately the same amount of time. The elders at the church that FamilyB attends all home school their children and they have recommended home school to the members of the church. FamilyB decides to home school their children and do so for several years. At some point, the Dad of FamilyB decides that home school is costing them too much in terms of time and energy. He talks to his wife and they decide to put their children in the local public school for the last four years of high school. This part is the key: in this example, FamilyB’s reasons for stopping home schooling are carnal and are based on their own selfishness.

Based on what I know of grace in Scripture, it would not be unreasonable to expect that God would treat these two families very different for their decisions. He may very well bless FamilyA and protect their children from certain dangers while FamilyB and their children may have a very different experience in the same school during the same time period.

Example 2:
Two young Christians get married and have a couple of children. Because of the way they were taught, and the church that they are attending, and the best advice that they can get, they do not begin disciplining their children in earnest until they are three or four years old and they rarely spank them. Nevertheless, their children are relatively well behaved and respectful of their parents, their rules, and the Word of God. Over the next 14 years, the parents do not have any more children, but they do change churches and they mature quite a bit in their faith and in their understanding of Scripture. At this point, they have two more children in short order. Initially, they treat these children much as they did the previous two, but these children are much more unruly and do not respond to the limited discipline that they get.

In this situation, though there is only one family, the passage of time and the greater revelation of God is what has changed. We have every reason to believe that God would not bless their current actions where they have greater knowledge of him in the same way that he would when they acted through ignorance, but through faith as well. We also have every reason to believe that if they begin applying what God has revealed to them over the past 14 years they will see results (not perfection, not all their problems going away, but God will bless their obedience)

What I am trying to get at with these examples is not that we can control the actions of God or that works produce righteousness, but instead the idea that we cannot always compare two separate actions and understand why God chooses to bless or curse as He does. (In fact, we cannot always tell what is a blessing and what is a curse. I am also not saying that life is inscrutable and that we shouldn’t try to understand God or His ways.) Because grace is not some magic pill that fixes things, but is instead exactly how God as a Father/Judge/Triune God is working in the world both through His actions and through His revelation to each and every man, it is not something that we can just wave our hands at and explain away. Grace is complex because God is complex and grace is the work of God. But Grace is also simple because all we have to do to receive it, is to obey.

There is, of course, more to be said about grace and what it teaches us about God, but I think this is enough for now. I realize that this is a rather long post for this blog, but if you’ve managed to fight your way through it, I’d love to know what you think.