Dr. Gary Habermas, world-renowned expert on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, discusses losing his 43 year old wife to stomach cancer. He has a perspective you might not expect. Profound.
Excerpt from “Jesus Is Involved In Politics! Why aren’t You? Why Isn’t Your Church?” Rational Free Press 2010 (c) Neil MammenAvailable on Amazon and at www.JesusIsInvolvedInPolitics.com Socrates (to Euthyphro): “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”
Plato, The Euthyphro Dilemma
Christian morality is based on pleasing or satisfying the whimsical capricious God of the Bible, with only secondary importance for “doing unto others as you would yourself” and “loving your neighbor.”
Council for Secular Humanism1
Pointy Headed Boss (to Dilbert): “You are not allowed to have internal phone lists on your wall. There are excellent reasons for this policy, and I hope to someday know what they are.”
Later – Pointy Headed Boss (to Catbert, Evil Director of Human Resource): “They’re getting suspicious about the Random Policy Generator.”
Dilbert Cartoon
Why The Law Was Given:Is God Capricious? Is God Good?
Did God arbitrarily make up the laws?
My Hindu friend who always argues with me about religion, had a smirk on his face. Now, you must realize that he was only Hindu by name and by culture, not by conviction. He was a functional agnostic. The fact that we were eating at a vegetarian restaurant was because he’d grown up vegetarian and never developed a taste for meat. “Why is god good?” he asked with that smirk. “Is he good because whatever he does is good? If he said killing infidels was good would that make it good?”
When we try to argue that God’s moral values are applicable to everyone and should be used as a basis for legislation, we have to first prove that God is not capricious. What my Hindu friend had been reading was the atheist claim that God arbitrarily decides what is good and what is bad. That, they say, makes Him capricious and His laws unworthy. Let me provide you with a definition of the word capricious.
Capricious adj.: determined by chance or impulse or whim rather than by necessity or reason; “authoritarian rulers are frequently capricious.”2
The quote at the beginning of this chapter from the Council for Secular Humanism claims God is capricious and whimsical; He randomly decides what is good and what is evil for no good reason. This was Socrates’ question to his student Euthyphro.
Bertrand Russell the avidly avowed atheist formulated the problem this way in his book, Why I Am Not A Christian:
If you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat [decree/command] or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.
If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not good independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to[prior to/separate from] God.3
In other words, Russell said that if good is good because God randomly decided what was good, then good is not really good. It is arbitrary. But if good is good because of something separate from God, then God is not sovereign because He’s a slave to this goodness and thus goodness is greater than God. Is Russell right? Of course he is not, and I’ll show you how to refute him completely in the next few pages.
Is whatever we do for God good?
Remember the Gestapo Captain and the liberal Rabbi in the Walter Martin story we described in an earlier chapter. The liberal Rabbi who believes there is no objective right or wrong is asked by the Gestapo Captain, “I’m going to kill you, is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”
The liberal Rabbi can’t say, “Because it’s wrong or because it’s inhumane or because it’s bad.”4
In many ways, the Gestapo Captain was a relativistic thinker just like the liberal Rabbi. The Captain thought that whatever he did for the Nazi party or the German people was automatically good and that morality was something that the Nazis, not the Jews, got to define. In the same way if we were to say blindly that whatever we do for God is automatically good, it could lead to relativistic thinking and the claim of capriciousness. So let’s see how we can refute this claim.
Why God is not capricious
First, we must understand that it’s important that the laws that we are given be non-capricious real laws with real consequences. If God were to give us laws that had no real consequences and merely order us to obey them because it was His whim, then He would indeed be capricious. And those laws would be illogical, unnecessary, random and arbitrary.5 Sadly many Christians don’t seem to realize this. I personally didn’t either until I had to respond to an atheist about it. (This is one of the reasons for my zeal for apologetics).
Take the first point: All the laws that God gave us must be real laws with real and negative consequences to humans (I will prove this with examples later). But that means when we sin, we are effectively committing a double crime – that is, doing two bad things. We are hurting ourselves and others, and we are rebelling against the Almighty G
od who created us. The latter being the more serious crime, but understandably not one that we wish to legislate.
Second, we have to understand that the secular atheistic humanists have phrased the problem based on their limited understanding of God. It’s not that God is capricious or that He is beholden to a higher value. What will refute them and Russell is simply this:
God is good.
And that is our second point.
Huh? You ask.
Let me explain. It’s not that God has arbitrarily determined what good is. Nor it is that He is beholden to a higher value than Himself. It’s just that His very nature is one of goodness. God is good. God is by nature good. Goodness is who He is. God could no more decide tomorrow that torturing babies for fun was good than he could ever stop being God. Yes, God is enslaved but He is enslaved by His own nature. He is enslaved to God. He is enslaved to Himself. It’s that vicious cycle similar to God having to be the center of His own praises. God could no more stop being good than He could stop being God.6 Good is good, and God is good. Their sources are the same.
“Ah but,” my atheist friends complain, “you’ve not defined good, you’ve just said that God is good, so your definition of good is God and your definition of God is good. That’s circular reasoning, and you can’t prove it.”
But as we have already shown it is actually circular reasoning if you try to create a definition of good without a supreme moral giver. You need a standard and you need a standard giver.
Since my atheist friends cannot come to a definition of good without a standard, they are in a similar dilemma. At least our theory has explanatory power and is self-consistent.7 Do note, however, that I do not use this methodology to prove the existence of God. There are enough other ways to do this (all outside the scope of this book, see “Who is Agent X? Proving that Science and Logic show it is more reasonable to think God exists,” Neil Mammen, Rational Free Press, 2009).
Since the source of the definition of good is self evident, and the character of God is good, then it follows that God and the source of good can be the same. So there is no capriciousness in God.
But is it circular reasoning? It isn’t, if I can show that God has to be good to be God. It’s not circular reasoning then because being good inherently is a necessary condition for any god to be the God.
A bad god won’t last long
Let’s look at this. God could not be anything but good. In other words, there could not exist a god, who was bad, or a god who was irrational, or a god who was not loving. Why? Because it would not work. An irrational god would self-destruct and could not last for all eternity. An evil god would never survive. A deficient god who was in any way not self sufficient, or in any way destructive, or in anyway not ‘just,’ or not loving could not last for infinity as his own shortcomings would destroy him.
How can I prove this? Quite simply: Bad cannot exist except as a privation of good, bad is a corruption of good. What I mean by that is that there is nothing such as “bad,” bad only exists if good is corrupted.8 If good ceases to exist, bad will cease to exist as well. A good example is a shadow (note, I don’t mean darkness9). A shadow cannot exist without light. If a shadow were to destroy all light, it would destroy itself. All that would be left is darkness, which is not a shadow, it’s nothing.
That means infinite bad cannot exist, as it will cease to exist as soon as it becomes infinite. Since by necessity God is infinite10, He can never be infinitely or perfectly bad, as He will self-destruct (of course, the concept of God self-destructing doesn’t make sense, and that’s why we see that a bad god is impossible).
People can argue about it any way they want, but if they adhere to logic they’ll end up coming to the same conclusion.
I would theorize that even Satan realized that if he were able to survive without God (remember Satan was merely a created being),11 he would inevitably destroy himself as he became fully evil. A deficient evil being like Satan could not become or maintain himself as a universal eternal being. This is further exacerbated by the fact that evil has no definition if good does not exist; yet good, while not being fully appreciated, would still exist without evil. In all evil situations some good must exist. Even in Hitler’s Germany, those who were Nazi’s did good things. They loved their children. They cared for their elderly parents, (though who knows how long that would have lasted with their euthanasia programs?) It is impossible to imagine how the Nazis could have continued to exist if every Nazi was absolutely evil.12
So, as we can see, good can exist without evil. However, evil will destroy itself without good. Thus to exist, God must be good. Good must be a core characteristic of God. It’s not separate. Bertrand Russell has been refuted.
Note too that “Good” as we see, is a transcendent value. Good existed long before a universe existed. Similarly 1+1= 2 long before any universe was created and it will still be true after all universes have died a heat death. There are no possible universes where 1+1 is not equal to 2. Mathematics is a transcendent art. So are truth, justice, logic, rationality, love, reason and well, set theory among others.13 They are all part of the very intrinsic nature of God. They are transcendent and eternal.
Addendum
Do note, this blog is not attempting to prove any of the following: 1. That God is indeed actually good. I’ll leave that argument to others. It only concludes that IF He exists he must be good.2. That God exists (for that evidence please refer to the book “Who is Agent X? Proving Science and Logic show it’s more rational to think God exists.” available at www.NoBlindFaith.com)
End notes:
- www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=columns&page=news
- www.thefreedictionary.com/capricious3. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1957), 12. As quoted by Gregory Koukl in Euthyphro’s Dilemma on the Stand to Reason website.www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5236
- Yes, yes, I know you are thinking that he could say, “I have information that I can us
e to buy my life…” but let’s assume like most of the Jews who were sadly killed, he doesn’t have anything that the Gestapo Captain needed, that the Captain couldn’t have taken anyway. - Someone could argue that the command by God in the Garden of Eden, “Don’t eat of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” was capricious. But that would be presumptuous. Whenever we are dealing with an intelligent agent like God, presuming you know all the parameters as a human is illogical. We can’t argue from the lack of evidence. In addition as mentioned in an earlier footnote, if God did not give Adam the ability and opportunity to reject Him or disobey Him, He would not have truly given Adam freewill.
- Remember as we’ve said in a previous footnote, one of the things that we need to be clear about is that God cannot do anything. He cannot stop being God, He cannot sin, He cannot cease to exist, and He cannot be irrational or illogical. He cannot learn. He cannot make a round two- dimensional square. He cannot make 1+1 = 3. All of those actually are derived from “He cannot stop being God.” For a full logical response to “Can God create a stone so big that he cannot move it” see www.JesusIsInvolvedInPolitics.com and do a search for “Stone so big.”
- William Lane Craig, one of this century’s best debaters and philosophers, has used this argument quite successfully in many debates against atheists. I.e. if objective moral values exist, then God exists. Objective moral values do exist, thus God exists. See www.williamlanecraig.com. I always describe Dr. Craig this way: He’s the guy who, after he’s done debating an atheist, you actually feel sorry for the atheist. In his winsome manner, Craig destroys every single one of their arguments. Most atheists don’t know what hit them.
- One could try to argue that bad is a corruption of an amoral thing as well. For instance, a knife is amoral, for one can use it to kill instead of cut an apple. But the very existence of that knife is “good.” It is good that the knife exists because it is useful and has purpose. Non-existence would be the only truly amoral thing, but non-existence is not an option if anything at all exists.
- Darkness would be nothing or amorality in this example, i.e. neutrality- neither good nor evil.
- 1This can be proved in one paragraph; science agrees that whatever caused the Universe to begin at the point of the Big Bang was outside of time and space. This can only be an infinite being, since you cannot create time if you are in time. For more on this go to www.NoBlindFaith.com and search for “proving God exists without using the Bible.”
- I have a trick question that I use now and then. I ask, “Who is the opposite of Satan?” The answer is not God. Satan is a created being not a creator. He is not omnipresent in time and space and all dimensions. He is not omnipotent or omniscient. The closest opposite to Satan may be one of the archangels. If you ask, “Who is the opposite of God?” The answer is “No one” No one can be the equal and opposite of the Almighty Eternal Creator.This also means that Satan must be of such a mind that either he knowing that he can never destroy God wishes to be a thorn in God’s side till he Satan is destroyed or thinking that he can destroy God is willing to destroy himself to do so.
- This is similar to the concept of Total Depravity. We humans are totally depraved, but we are not absolutely depraved. This means that while we have a depraved sin nature, not everything we do is sinful or destructive.
- Note that physical, atomic, and chemical laws are not necessarily transcendent because they did not causally (that’s cause-ally not casually) exist before the universe was created and one could feasibly reason than a universe could be created with different laws.
Here is animated short film called, “Is God Good?” In less than two minutes, it succinctly addresses how human freedom relates to the problem of evil (with some brilliant animated imagery).
This 2-minute video is a kind of animation known as kinetic type. This genre allows the artist to get a little crazy – words become designs, not merely carriers of information. My goal in producing this animation was to have fun – which I did – and to creatively express this idea: the presence of evil in our world does NOT mean that there is no God; rather, it means that he’s up to something. This is a short video so it only scratches the surface – but at least it introduces the concepts and, hopefully, encourages further thought on the subject.
Whenever I think about deep stuff like evil and suffering, I find it helpful to remember two aspects of God’s nature. First, he is perfectly just. So all evil will eventually be punished perfectly and appropriately. Second, he is perfectly loving. Thus, God extends himself sacrificially to forgive those who do evil (all of us) and provide an escape from punishment. What’s amazing to me is how both of these sides of God, his justice and love, collide on the cross with Jesus Christ. You know someone truly loves you if they are willing to die for you. But when God forgave us, he did not simply ignore our evil thoughts, choices, and actions. That wouldn’t be justice, would it? All of our crimes, big and small, were punished perfectly, but the punishment was re-directed toward Jesus Christ. The punishment that Jesus took upon himself demonstrate God’s love and God’s justice.
This video also touches on another cool idea: God is a gentleman. That is, he doesn’t force his love on the objects of his affection (all of us). He is persuasive – not coercive. He allows you to turn your back on him if you prefer to be the captain of your own ship. You may not want to acknowledge a higher authority to whom you must answer. You may not want to admit that you don’t have your act together. He allows you to make that choice. On the other hand, you might realize that God’s relentless love is what you’ve been searching for all of your life. It’s like this: a gentleman does not force a woman to marry him. He becomes vulnerable. He expresses his love to her by his words and actions. Then he asks her to make a decision: “Will you marry me?” At this point, the ball is in her court. She can either accept or reject his offer. In the same way, each of us can accept or reject God’s offer of a life-giving connection through Jesus Christ.
As recorded in John Chapter 9, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”
Australian Nick Vujicic– born without arms and legs– is a living example of that passage. We say the man has a birth defect. But after viewing this, I think I have a far more serious attitude defect.
Recently I posted a book review on “O God” which talks about Oprah’s spirituality. Like most of my apologetics conversations lately, the discussion quickly turned to morality. I find this phenomenon interesting and revealing. Sure, I’m still operating largely on anecdotes and personal experience, but others have attested to my theory.
No, my theory is not that German’s love David Hasselhoff (and they do, or at least some of the old female ones do). My theory is that Atheist’s love to talk about morality.
It’s true! Theists and Christians in particular seem more eager to talk about the Gospel and about sin. But I’m finding more and more atheists wanting to discuss philosophical and scientific approaches to moral systems. Last year I was on the panel for three “God-talks” at UT Arlington, UT Dallas, and Texas A&M where two atheists and two theists discussed the question of God’s existence and the relevance of that question for meaning, morality, origin and destiny. And sure enough, we spent most of the night, at all three venues talking about morality. Intelligent Design was comparatively small, as was the Problem of Evil, and other heavy topics. We instead spent most of our time talking about Objectivist ethics versus Subjectivist or Relativist ethics.
I suspect that atheists are interested in morality for the same reason creationists are interested in carbon dating–this topic could be devastating if you don’t do your homework. Some atheists try to ground ethics in objective moral values. Others bite the bullet and amputate objectivism. Moral relativism however is not an easy option though. If I can take my professor hat off for a moment, I think we have a love-hate relationship with moral relativism. We like parts of it, and dislike part of it. We hate when people are relativistic towards us, but we love to be relativistic towards others. To put it another way, moral relativisism is that girl you date or you’re friends with, but she cheats on you if you marry her. She’s fun to play with for the short-term, but there’s no hope in committment. But kept at arms length one can dance with relativism indefinitely.
Whether one is objectivist or relativist, or something in between, ethics is an inexact science. And digging out the details can take a lifetime. We sometimes have to bite our lip and just admit that some things remain unclear–no matter what side we are on. Some points of debate cannot be clarified very much at all. This means that one can easiy find “weaknesses” in any given system–whatever the sort–because none of these systems achieve the exactitude and precision we expect from math or the natural sciences.
Also, a blog site is not the right way to clarify one’s entire ethical system. But as a concession to those commentors so interested in morality. Below is a revised form of my moral argument for God, which, incidentally is an argument for objectivist ethics. What follows is only an argument, not a fully orbed explanation of Christian ethics.
Chomp away at this. . .
1) Ethics is the stuff of minds (whether minds are properties of brains or immaterial–it does not matter at this point).
2) Nature is not intelligent, does not “intend” or have “purpose”–it operates in non-mind categories. (without a God, it cannot be teleological–ie: have a telos, “end, goal, designed purpose, etc.” this incudes moral purposes/objectives such as virtues, duties, rights, etc.)
3) Yet there seem to exist moral values that non-objectivist systems are at a loss to explain. Negative evidences include: a) the problem of temporal-discrimination (calling slavery “evil” when it was “good” in its time), b) the problem of bi-culturality (people can be members of two conflicting cultures, but all ethic naturalistic systems are incomparable since there is no non-circular grounds of judging between them), c) the problem of the revolutionary (Minority ethical convictions and radicals are always immoral if “good” is a majority opinion), d) the problem of cross-cultural conflict (no culture’s ethics is better than anothers, even Hitler or Mao’s), e) the problem of subjectivism (no one can call anything anyone else does “evil” unless that person defies his/her own ethical system–even if their system is reprehensible), f) the problem of ignorance (even if many or most ethical values are subjective, there still may be objective values yet undiscovered or masked as relative values), Positive evidences include: a) Moral values are experienced by everyone reading this, b) Morality is a cultural universal, c) Our experience of morality is that there are binding rules that we should obey and others should obey even if they never get caught and even if they enjoy the contrary, d) at least some points of morality are not reducible to simple altruism and the Golden rule, e) Morality is a temporal universal (has occurred throughout time), f) our morality becomes objectivist when we are the victim.
4) but if ethics is at all objective (even in part), then the naturalistic fallacy prevents any natural grounding for ethics–ie: in human minds, or in the rest of nature. The naturalistic fallacy, also called the “Is-ought” fallacy suggests that there is some kind of circular or presumptive reasoning whenever a person argues from (non-teleological) nature that a moral ought follows from it. In other words, nature just is or is not. It knows nothing of what “ought” to be.
5) Binding moral values, which exists, requires a grounds for their existence.
6) Binding moral values then have at least some basis outside of nature.
7) This basis must be a mind sufficient to ground objectively binding moral values within our world.
8 ) By the law of conservation (ie: Ockham’s Razor) we need not postulate more than one supernatural mind to ground said ethics, unless the data set demands it.
9) We (the Christian and the Atheist) can agree from our own observations and reasoning that no other God is needed to ground ethics–so polytheism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, animism, henotheism, finite Godism, are unwarranted insertions (we just disagree over whether A God is needed at all to ground ethics).
[10) Goodness is better explained as an attribute of God than as a command of God (since the latter would be undermined by the euthyphro dilemma).]–this is a side note for Divine Command Theorist reading this.
11) Therefore I know God is good because [see #1-10].
In the new book “O” God: A Dialogue on Truth and Oprah’s Spirituality. (CA: WND, 2009; 128pg) renowned Christian apologist Josh McDowell and up-and-comer Dave Sterrett offer a brief popular level critique of Oprah Winfrey’s growing and influential religion.To keep the reading light the authors present their apologetic in a story-form dialogue between a young divorced grad-student Lindsey and her PhD friend, a newly converted Christian and former yoga teacher, Avatari. As these two 30 year olds discuss their lives and issues they bat around tenets of Oprah-ology. Naturally, Oprah’s spiritual mentors like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra surface too. Both friends watch the Oprah show and read “O” Magazine, but Lindsey and Avatari disagree over the “truth” therein. The end result is that Avatari uses apologetics to share her faith with Lindsey, who in turn shares her new found faith with her mother. In the course of this drama the authors progressively unravel the paper-thin veneer of Christian lingo on Oprah’s spirituality then dissect the remaining new-age mysticism underneath.
This book is clearly apologetic, intending to educate and dissuade the reading from Oprah’s spirituality. Key points include arguments for Christian exclusivism (ch1,4), absolute truth (ch5), theism (ch7), the historic Jesus (ch9), the reliability of the New Testament (pg95), and resurrection (ch10), a rebuttal of pantheism (ch7, pg73), notes on the problem of blind faith (pg98), a defense of the moral argument for God (pg86), and a critique of the New Thought, “think-yourself-well” movement (ch6). This book is a great introduction into cultural apologetics. It is accessible, simple, readable and still surprisingly meaty. O God is utterly relevant in culture because it sets its sights on the queen of American culture Oprah Winfrey together with her heir apparent, New Age spirituality. As it turns out, New Age is hardly an heir, but rather a Hindu-esque fog of pantheism. McDowell and Starrett keep the page count down, the plot-line simple, the topics clear, and the overall readability up. A discussion guide is also included should the reader want to incorporate this material into a church study group, home group, or religion class.
As an apologist myself, this book is a helpful addition to my library on Cults, World Religions and Alternative Spirituality. Oprah-ology is nothing new, to those who have studied about pantheism and eastern religions. But this book may surprise people who thought of Oprah as a good Christian girl. Before this book I did not know how non-Christian Oprah’s religion was, nor how openly she admits to anti-Christian beliefs. Oprah is a new-thought, religious pluralist who denies absolute truth, Christian theism, sin, hell, and the Trinity. This book however is not a critique of Oprah—God bless whatever good she offers to the world—but rather a focused response to her skewed beliefs, which take her out of classical Christianity. But neither does O God stop at critiqueing Oprah-ology. O God is evangelistic, tying together rebuttal with affirmation, countering pantheism with Christian theism, finally offering an apologetically polished uniquely beautiful Christian gospel. This book deserves commendation for “calling it like it is.” In a hazy world of gray shades and fuzzy borders, when people turn up sick from moral ambiguity and spiritual banality, O God shines a refreshing bright light while sharpening the surgeon’s scalpel. Soul surgery can now take place.
I’m amazed by this man’s ability. How did such a mind arise: from matter or a greater mind? In fact, how did any mind arise?
Yesterday I got a call from my friend Bob Cornuke who is a Christian Indiana Jones. He had big news. Three years ago, Bob led me along with an expeditionary team into Iran to look for remnants of Noah’s Ark. In addition to Noah’s Ark, Bob has been looking for other major biblical archaeological finds including the real Mount Sinai (it’s in Saudi Arabia, not the Sinai Peninsula), and the Ark of Covenant—the golden chest in which the Israelites carried the actual stone Ten Commandments Moses received on Mount Sinai (yes, the Ark that was the subject of Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Here’s why Bob called. For years Bob has taken trips to Axum Ethiopia to the church where he, and others, have long-believed the real Ark has been kept. According to a report here, their beliefs are going to be confirmed today, June 26. 2009. Those supposedly in control of the ark for over 2,500 years are in Rome today after meeting with the Pope. They say they are going to reveal the Ark to the world and put it in a new museum in Axum. When will it be available for inspection? We don’t know. Bob thinks it might take a year to get the museum built. Hopefully more details will be revealed today. Bob is heading to Axum in a couple of weeks and again in January. Lord willing, I may join him for the January trip.
Who knows if this is the real deal, but it sure is interesting. If this report is true and it turns out to be the real Ark (we don’t know at this point), we won’t open it because we don’t want our faces to melt!
I’ll keep you informed of any developments from the inside. In the meantime, keep an eye on the news today, and read more about the Ark and Bob’s adventures here: www.BaseInstitute.org.
Here is an UPDATE for FRIDAY Evening: Nothing revealed from the Ethiopian official today. Click here for the story and more details on theories about the Ark. If an announcement is made, I’ll report it here.
(Author’s note: This is the fourth and last installment in a series discussing why Christians worship God. On this blog, the first installment may be found here, the second here, and the third here. On the author’s blog, the first installment can be found here, the second, here, and the third, here.)
Intimate Worship: Our Response To God As Companion
It was very difficult to write this last installment about intimate worship. Imagine trying to explain, after 30 years of marriage, exactly why you love your wife. It’s hard to say, exactly; and then, you can’t express it without exposing a part of yourself that’s usually reserved only for her. Worse, you feel certain that some who don’t understand will belittle your description, because it will be difficult for them to understand how such a relationship is even possible. That’s what I’m facing here. I’m exposing an intimate part of my soul with the expectation that it will be despised. Worse, I know my expression is going to fall far, far short of the reality, because it simply can’t be expressed in words. This is not easy.
There is far too little written of the individual Christian’s relationship with God. So little is written, and it’s often so vague, that people who have not experienced it have little idea what we even mean by it. Not only that, but I have only a small idea that what I mean by it is similar to what someone else means by it. I know there are elements I have in common with other believers, because I hear them speak of it from time to time — answers to prayer, conviction about particular weaknesses, encouragement in various forms. But there seem to be some parts of my relationship with God that not all other believers experience; and likewise, there are some things others say about their relationships with God that go deeper than what I experience. It seems that because everyone is different, God addresses each of us individually. It seems that some parts of our relationship depend on our willingness to go there.
And yet, this is the central fact of Christianity — that each of us may draw close to God through the agency of Christ, and become His friend, confidante, and disciple.
All of us Christians have in common that God addresses our character, and changes it dramatically. He arranges the combination of events and information in such a way as to identify changes we must make to our character, and He causes us to change by way of circumstances. This is a long-term process; it begins on the first day one becomes a Christian, and continues unabated for decades; or at least, that’s what has happened to me.
God also provides encouragement at intervals along the way, letting us know how He feels about us. It’s not just information that we apply to our particular circumstances; reminders of particular lessons arrive at the moment when they’re most needed, and we become aware that God knows how we’re feeling, and knows precisely what we need to hear. He sends friends to us when we need them, and assistance. The man who has the skills to repair our stove appears just when we need him; a job comes open at just the right time; we hear a chance word that settles the secret worry of our heart. Most Christians that I know experience this providential timing of events, and divine provision for their needs.
Underneath all this, we learn general truth from reading the scriptures, and from interacting with other believers, and come to understand the framework within which we live in Christ. There are moments when what we read is precisely the thing we needed to remember, but most times we’re just building gradually on an existing foundation of truth and understanding.
And then, there are individual quirks regarding how God gets our attention and communicates, and these are different for everybody. My wife, for example, sees significance in colors. When God has something to say to her, she notices a particular color that stands out, and over the years she’s come to associate specific colors with specific meanings. Also, when God wants to get her attention, she loses something; she might misplace her car keys, for example, and whenever she finds them, the location where she finds them and the nature of how she misplaced them will give her insight into some problem she’s facing at the moment. I don’t experience either of those things, although because I know her, I pay attention when she loses something. I know God’s trying to get my attention when I hear the same phrase several times during the same day, and the phrase usually indicates the general tenor of the message. I had a friend a while back who was a pastor, who used to know he was supposed to call a specific individual if he heard that individual’s name three times on the same day. As soon as the man’s name came up the third time, this fellow would drop what he was doing, pick up the phone, and call; invariably, the answer he’d get would include “How did you know I needed to talk to you?” A lot of Christians tell me of this sort of interaction between them and God in their lives, but it’s different for every individual, and some do not experience anything like this.
All of the interaction I’ve described goes on subtly, without fanfare. God is seldom ostentatious; He does what He needs to do to get His point across with a bare minimum of disturbance, and He leaves no tracks. Nature is the stationery on which He writes His notes to us and the pen with which He writes them, so communication almost always occurs as something about which one could say “It’s just a normal event” or “It’s just a coincidence,” and it never comes with an audit trail. So those who never experience it, think we’re just making fanciful illusions about ordinary events; and yet, for those who do experience it, God’s communication is constant, persistent, unmistakable, undeniable, and always, always deeply meaningful.
In all of these things, the Christian life is like a marriage. God is present at all times. One learns to speak to Him constantly, and in turn, He speaks periodically to specific items that need adjustment. The constant interplay of prayer and answer gradually becomes a backdrop to life that is very much like the companionship of a spouse or a beloved friend. One becomes used to a constant undercurrent of conversation with God. One comes to rely on it. One falls in love with Him.
Beyond this, one develops a deeply seated sense of gratitude, because God is so constantly meeting our needs in such profound ways. This affects different people differently, but their expressions about it all have a ring to them that’s similar to all the other expressions. In my own case, I have a strong sense of what my life would have been like without His intervention. I’m a recovering sex addict; I doubt that I would have lived as long as I have, or else I would have become a hopeless pervert and ruined myself and others. I can’t think about this without tears of gratitude, so I keep it in the background most of the time.
Those who have not known God, or those whose experience of the Church has been completely about practicing religion and religious habit, have no idea what I’m talking about. For those of us who have experienced God in significant degree, though, our love for God is very much like our love for our parents, or for our spouse, or for a lifelong friend; only, coupled with those feelings is the additional feeling of gratitude, because this friend, this spouse, this parent, is infallible. He’s always right, always accepting, always trustworthy, and always profound. We owe everything to Him.
To speak of commanding our love is absurd. For the Christian who has learned to love God, there’s no question of command. We offer our love and gratitude unstintingly. How could we do otherwise? He’s our whole life. What else is there?
It is this constant, inner gratitude and affection for God that constitutes the last sort of worship I’m going to write about; this is the intimate communication and devotion between God and His beloved. To know and to adore are the very center of God’s being, the thing that identifies Him most accurately, the thing that He does simply because it’s who He is. Those who come to know Him, adore Him back in like manner. To know fully, even as we are fully known; this is heaven, and the eternal life, and true worship.
(Author’s note: This is the third installment in a series discussing why Christians worship God. The first installment can be found here, and the second, here.)
Battle Worship: Our Cooperation With God As Liberator
There’s a fascinating scene in The Two Towers, the movie based on the second book of JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which Frodo and Sam are being led through the Dead Marshes by Gollum. There’s a narrow path through the marsh that only Gollum knows, but there are ghostly men in the water all around them, giving off ghostly lights that entice and entrap. Gollum advises them sternly, “Don’t follow the lights.” But Frodo, enchanted by the cursed ring he’s carrying to its destruction, allows himself to be distracted by the lights, and finds himself falling into the water beside the path and seeing the dead as though they’d come to life. Gollum, seeing him fall, hauls him out of the water and exhorts him, “Don’t follow the lights!”
Christianity posits Earth as enemy-occupied territory in a celestial war. Humans, once granted dominion over the planet, invited demonic domination by sinning, and surrendered the planet into the hands of spirits rebelling against the reign of God. Every place in history where God intervened in the affairs of men constitutes a beachhead where God’s dominion has been re-established in some measure. Around those beachheads — the kingdom of Judah under righteous kings, the prophets, the Son of God and all those places where the Son’s followers obey Him — hover the unclean spirits as an occupying army, deceiving and destroying the souls who are their captives.
In ancient times, those who would follow and obey the true God and escape the influence of the occupying demons were given a task similar to Frodo and Sam’s journey through the Dead Marsh: don’t leave the path, keep your focus on God. This is the first of the Ten Commandments:
I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
You shall have no other gods before Me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.
You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,
but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
Exodus 20:2-6
The Ten Commandments, as the opening instructions in the Law of Moses, were commands to an ancient people in the peculiar position of being God’s first major beachhead on the occupied planet. There’s a metaphor here that’s particular to their situation — “a jealous God” — aimed at emphasizing the central importance of keeping their practices free of distracting elements. They didn’t realize how different they were, but God insisted on their unified focus to the exclusion of other gods for their own protection; every glance at other gods constituted a breach of their martial perimeter. (Imagining that God is literally jealous in the manner of ancient deities is like imagining, upon reading in the Psalms that God “will enfold you under His wings,” that God is a giant chicken. It’s a metaphor.)
It’s as though ancient Israel was Frodo’s and Sam’s fellowship in The Two Towers. Worship is the natural impulse of the soul, as we discovered in Part I. With the eyes of the soul fixed on the Almighty, one consistently remains on the path through the marsh. There are distractions to either side, but those distractions are demonic, like the souls of dead men in the Dead Marsh, and to be distracted by them is fatal. Don’t follow the lights; keep your focus on God, and on God alone. Unless you do this, you will eventually become unable to obey the other rules, as you become increasingly dominated by demonic influences.
When one’s focus shifts to some object of worship other than God, says the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, one worships demons (see I Corinthians 10:20). Paul was not speaking by analogy, but explaining truth as understood by Jewish theology. This explains why when humans worship lesser objects — statues of earthly objects and animals, heavenly bodies like the sun, moon, and stars, or imaginary beasts — they tend toward horrible practices, beginning with mindless, OCD-like repetitions, but at the extremities leading to the sacrificing of human beings, the drinking of human blood, burning children in the fire, and so forth.
With the coming of Christianity, the role of worship shifted. Whereas under Judaism the focus was simply keeping a besieging army at bay and protecting a tiny beachhead, under Christianity the task was invasion and re-occupation. The intent of Christianity was to push the demonic influences off the planet altogether, and establish the dominion of the Kingdom of God. In our Lord of the Rings analogy, it’s as though Christianity came to the Dead Marshes intending to drain them and clear them for building. Never mind “don’t follow the lights;” extinguish the lights. Bury the dead out of sight. Make the whole thing safe.
Here in the West, the sorts of demonic practices that usually characterize the worship of other gods died out a long time ago. It’s easy to take it for granted that such things are artifacts of a less enlightened past, but that’s just a Western conceit. Those practices died out in the West specifically because Christianity, the religion of the West, abhors them. They still go on in other places less influenced by the West, and as the West increasingly abandons the Christianity that built her, those sorts of practices will gradually reassert themselves.
This is why Christians denounce practices like Wicca. Wiccan rites seem relatively harmless, as the worship of false gods goes, but that’s because they were formulated in a culture still influenced by the habits of Christianity. As the Western knowledge of God recedes, the practices of those who worship other gods will become less and less harmless, and more and more demonic. They’re ceding ground to a vanquished army. They’re permitting a wedge that will become a breach.
I call the worship of God aimed at keeping us out of the demonic traps “battle worship,” recalling the fact that as servants of God, we’re engaged in recapturing the planet from the demonic warlords that occupy her. Wherever the worship of Christ displaces the worship of other things, God has influence to establish righteous behavior. It’s not an accident that the civilization built by Christianity is the one that abolished human slavery and introduced universal literacy and self-government. The knowledge of God pushes back the influence of the demonic; and while all Christian practices have the effect of establishing God’s influence here on earth, the first and foremost weapon for achieving God’s dominion is the worship of God. Worship has impact in the unseen world of spirits, pushing back the dark influences. Once the means by which humans could remain on a narrow path — “don’t follow the lights” — worship is now one of the primary tools for establishing God’s presence.