Warren's Inauguration Prayer

Rick Warren, the pastor of an mega-church in California, was selected by President-Elect Obama to give the prayer at the inauguration. It has stirred some controversy because of Warren's position with respect to gay marriage. Here is a very interesting interview with Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, on the subject.

Living the Dream

Summary from class on October 5, 2008.

What does paradise mean to you?  Many people dream of winning the lottery and enjoying life with millions of dollars in the bank.  No more work to keep you from doing what you want when you want.  Economic freedom which would mean that you wouldn't have to listen to anyone.  Rich people get to do what they want and answer to no one.  Would that be paradise?

Christians have the benefit of knowing what exactly paradise is and what it was meant to be.  In Genesis 2 Moses described God's design of paradise: the Garden of Eden.

Working Paradise.  On a tough day at work in our sinful world, it's not hard to imagine that paradise would mean no job to be done.  We can see Adam sitting around eating grapes and relaxing.  That is not in God's plan.  "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it."  Before sin entered the world, man was intended to have a job.  Whether you are 20 or 80, work is part of our service to God.  Paul made this point clearly in Collossians 3:23, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men."  Isn't that the key, any job can be satisfying and meaningful if we do it not for men but for God.

For those who are still in the workforce, that means that you should treat your job as being done for the Lord.  When I go to work as a lawyer, I need to think about doing my job the best I can, not to bring glory to myself, but to bring glory to God.  Retired Christians should still be at work.  Many people see retirement as the time that they can focus on pleasing themselves.  That is not what God has in mind for us.  Retirement is a time when Christians can work in the church or performing good deeds which bring glory to God.

Obedient Paradise.  It is natural to think that it would be paradise to live without any rules.  We tend to think that if we only got to do whatever we wanted, we'd be happy.  Remember, God made us and knows what is best for us.  From the very beginning we had rules imposed by God for our good.   "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; buy you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."  All of God's rules are for our benefit and, if our attitude is right, they are not burdensome.  I John 5:1-4.   God's rules also bring us peace.  Psalms 119:165.  Why wouldn't we want to do the things that God knows are best for us.  

 There you have it.  Paradise as God planned it includes work and following the rules.  Enjoy!

What Does the Creation Story Tell Us About God?

Summary from class on September 28.

With such luminaries as Augustine and Calvin unable to agree on whether the creation story is allegory or should be interpreted in a strictly literal sense, where does that leave us lesser souls?  No matter how you interpret the story, God tells us wonderful and important things about Himself in the first chapter of Genesis.

Creator God.  One thing that we all Christians can agree upon and is that God created it all.  Unlike the creation myths of the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, Genesis tells us that God created the universe out of nothing.  The first words of the Bible make this clear:  "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."  This most fundamental of facts is the millstone around the neck of naturalism and atheism.  Without God, they have no rational answer for the question of where everything came from.  I suggest that if you are going to debate a naturalist or an atheist, don't waste you time with evolution, go right to the heart of the matter.  Where did it all come from without God to create it?

God is Not Limited by the Instruments He Chooses to Use.  Have you ever noticed that while day and night were created by God on day 1 of the creation story, the sun is not created until day 4?  Also, God created the plants on day 3 before the sun.  How could you have day and night and plants without the sun?  The simple answer is that God does not need the sun to have day and night.  He does not need the sun to make plants grow.  He may use the sun to do such things, but he does not need it.  So what does that mean to me and to you?  It means that the God who promised to take care of us does not need the instruments that we think He needs in order to do that.  If you think God needs you to have money in the bank or a good job in order to provide for you, you are mistaken.  He does not need those instruments of care any more than he needed the sun.  In these uncertain economic times, it is good to know that God can take care of us even if we don't have the things that we think are necessary.

God Sustains All Things.  Like the previous point, this one is based on the fact that day and night and the plants proceeded the sun.  Calvin argued that God performed creation in this order so that we would know that it was Him, and not the sun that really makes the plants grow.  Like the plants, it is God that sustains us in all things.  We may believe that we are responsible for taking care of our families and children.  Of course, we are supposed to work and to strive to do so, but ultimately, we can only trust and rely upon God, and not our own efforts, for sustenance.

Battles about the proper interpretation of Genesis chapter 1 seem to distract us from the meaningful truths about God that are there for our edification.  At the end of time, we will all know the truth about how God created it all, in the meantime, let's focus on what is truly important instead.

We've Been Debating This for How Long?

Is the creation story in Genesis to be interpreted in a straight, literal manner ( six 24 hour days of creation) or was it meant as allegory? Some think the debate over this question arose out of Darwinism, modern geology and the secularization of Western society. They could not be more wrong. The debate is as old a Christianity, and probably Judaism, itself.

I have set forth below a number of quotes from church fathers and Christian scholars about this issue.

Augustine (354-430 AD) said "The Spirit of God who spoke through them did not choose to teach about the heavens to men, as it was of no use for salvation." He also wrote the following in On the Literal Meaning of Genesis:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens,
and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars
and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of
the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of
animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being
certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.... Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

Bruce Walke is a current Christian Hebrew Scholar. He writes in his commentary on Genesis:

One of  the ways in which the text distances itself from a bare facts retelling of the events of creation is its metaphorical language. As soon as we talk about God in heaven, we are in a realm that can only be represented by earthly figures. The narrator must use metaphor and anthropomorphic language so that the reader can comprehend. When the text says that God said, commanded, called, and saw, are we to understand that God has vocal cords, lips, and eyes? Obviously this language is anthropomorphic, representational of the truth that God creates. If the narrator's descriptions of God are anthropomorphic, might not the days and other aspects also be anthropomorphic? The anthropomorphic allows us to enter into and identify with the creation account. The time of creation is presented in the anthropomorphic language of days so that humankind might mime the Creator. Since we cannot participate in vast stretches of time, how else could we imitate the creator, except with finite terms such as a week?

John Calvin took the position that God performed creation in six 24 hour days.  In his commentary on Genesis he wrote:

Here the error of those is manifestly refuted, who maintain that the world was made in a moment.  For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction.  Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men.

If the great minds of the faith can not resolve this issue, it seems to be reckless on our part to think that scripture requires one reading or the other.  It is best to consider the issue with humility and agree that Bible believing Christians may, in good faith and conscience, disagree on how to interpret this portion of scripture while being true to a literal interpretation of scripture.

You may ask, how could one interpret a portion of scripture as allegory and still be a Bible literalist?  To take the Bible literally means to take it in the author intended.  See Report of the Creation Study Committee  of the Presbyterian Church of America here.  If the author meant it as allegory, then a literalist reads it as such.  Jesus' parable are an example of this.  When Jesus told the parable of the seeds falling on the good ground and the bad, nobody asserts that Jesus was telling a story of something that was really happening.  He was telling a story to illustrate a point.  It would a violation of Biblical literalism to suggest otherwise.

The Evangelical Presbyterian Church does not take a position on the interpretation of the days of Genesis.  The Presbyterian Church of America, another conservative denomination, produced an 84 page report in 2000 to say that it was not taking a position on the issue.  See the link to the report above.  

I humbly suggest that the answer to this question is not an essential of the faith.  If it is not an essential, then there is liberty to hold different views and no one should be dogmatic in their assertion of their own view.

In the Beginning, God...

"In the beginning, God..." The Bible begins with those simple, yet awe inspiring words. In the first two chapters of the book, Moses gives us a peek at the beginning of time and the universe itself. With the possible exception of Revelations, no other book in the Bible even approaches the amazing scope of Genesis or has the power to capture our imagination.

When we think of the book of Genesis, we think stories. By using the word "story" I do not mean to imply in any way that they are not true. It can appear to be a collection of stories thrown together and unrelated. Nothing could be further from the truth. While it includes stories (creation, the garden, the fall, Noah and the flood to name a few) it is not really about them or the characters described in them. Genesis is about God. He is the primary character in each story and Genesis is an introduction of Him to His people. Even in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we learn about some of the most fundamental aspects of God's nature and character. He is the eternal creator of all. He is and remains all powerful over nature and his creations. Although He judges sin, He is always ready to extend grace.

Understanding Genesis can be a challenge to believers. With the creation/evolution debate raging in our culture, it is easy to think that challenges to the proper interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis have only come about since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species in 1859. In fact, Christians have debated how to interpret the first three chapters of Genesis since the earliest times. By way of example, Church fathers Origen and Augustine argued in favor of reading the creation story as allegory rather than literal history. Others have demanded a strict, literal interpretation of the six days of creation. Sound familar?

In scripture, as in life itself, context is crucial to understanding. What motivated Moses to write the story of creation and the fall? We know and believe that he did so under the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit, but that does not take away the importance of trying to know what purpose he was trying to acheive in doing so.

In his commentary on the book of Genesis, Bruce Walke argues that Moses wrote the creation story as a polemic against the cosmology of the Egyptians. The people of Israel were leaving 400 years of slavery in Egypt and had been influenced in their thinking about God by the religion of the Egyptians. Moses wanted to set the record straight so that the people of God would know Him better.

Genesis is not the first account of creation ever told or written. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians had creation stories. The Egyptians believed that (1) there were many gods, (2) the world pre-existed the gods, (3) the gods were powerful but not all powerful, and (4) that the gods were often out to get mankind. In Genesis, Moses clearly distinguishes the true God from the gods of Egypt. We see in Genesis that (1) there is only one God, (2) nothing existed prior to Him and that he created everything, (3) He is all powerful and in control of everything and (4) He loves man and seeks relationship with him.

To further his arguments, Moses wrote about historical events. Genesis is theology through history in the form of poetry and prose. What do I mean by that? Genesis was not written to be a history of the world. It certainly contains much history, but that is not the purpose for which it was written. It was written as theology, to tell us things about God and what we should believe about Him. It uses historical accounts to do so. It describes those accounts in various poetic and prosaic forms used in the Hebrew language. However, if we ever lose sight of the fact that it is theology and often in poetic form, we will not be able to understand its full import.

Therefore, any study of Genesis must focus on one central question: What does this passage, this story, tell me about God? The answer to that question, in creation, the fall or any other story, is the only truly important thing. This study of Genesis will attempt to answer that question.

Genesis

This fall I am teaching an adult Sunday school class at Central Presbyterian Church. Genesis chapters 1 through 11 is the subject matter for the class. I have and will rely on two commentaries on the book of Genesis. The first was written by Bruce Walke and the second by John Calvin.

Each week I plan to post a summary of the lesson here for review by anyone who is interested. I encourage you to make any appropriate comments.

Anglican Union

The global Anglican Communion's Lamberth Conference will be held this year at Cantebury, England. The conference takes place once every ten years and is designed to bring together all Anglican's world-wide and promote the unity of the communion.

The controversy over the role of homosexuals in the church is threatening to tear apart the Anglican Communion. It may have already done so. Many Anglican Bishops who support the historic, orthodox views on the subject have decided not to attend the conference and rather, attend a competing conference to be held in Jerusalem.

In 2007, J. I. Packer wrote a paper explaining the position of those who hold the historic, orthodox views. Packer explains that the real issue is not homosexuality, but rather how we view scripture. Although the paper is rather lengthy, I highly recommend that you read it. You can access the paper through this link. http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/2007/11/23/global-realignment-who-we-are-and-where-we-stand-ji-packer/

Although I am not an Anglican, I feel that all believers should pray for the Anglican Communion at this time. We should all want God's will to be done and for his word to be recognized as truth throughout the world. Once a church cuts its tie to the anchor of God's word, it is truly a boat adrift on the sea.

What's Holding You Back

Some time back, my wife recommended that I read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. After she assured me that she was not hinting at anything, I decided I would read it on a recent family trip.

I highly recommend the book.

Lewis imagines an afterlife where souls in Hell or Purgatory have an opportunity to be saved and go to Heaven. Lewis is upfront in the Preface with the fact that the storyline does not fit either Protestant nor Catholic theology. If you focus on that aspect of the book, you will completely miss the point. The book's true application is to our lives here on earth.

Most of the book consists of interviews that the lost souls, or ghosts as Lewis calls them, have with spirits from Heaven. The spirits are trying to convince the ghosts to give up Hell and come on the journey to Heaven with them. In turn, each ghost has something that he or she is unwilling to give up in order to get into Heaven. For one it is pride in his own accomplishments. For another it is lust.

The most challenging to the readers is the ghost who will not give up the love for her dead son in order to get into Heaven. At first blush, it is hard to see how a mother's love for her son could be something that God would want surrendered to Him. Lewis expertly shows how even that love can become an idol worshiped over God.

The book made me think about what things I hold on to, my ball and chain, which keep me from experiencing a full and fulfilling relationship with God. Whether you are a believer or not, there are things in your life which, if you are honest, you are not willing to give up to put God first. Is it your wife, your children, work, lust, money? In the end, none of them bring more than fleeting satisfaction.

I know that I am most happy and satisfied when my first thoughts are of God and His will for my life. Unfortunately, those times are few and far between. My prayer is that I will become more consistantly focused on God so that He can, over time, remove each ball and chain that is holding me back from Him.